Poultry against the Pestilence: Early Modern Surgeons’ treatments for the Plague

Hans von Gersdorff’s Feldbuch der Wundtartzney (Field Book of Surgery), Strasbourg, 1535. In some interpretations this illustration is seen as a representation of the Demon of the plague hovering over a plague patient.

The disease we now know as the “Black Death” first reached England in June 1348, entering from mainland Europe through one of the major port cities on the south coast. The disease spread quickly, engulfing the whole country by 1349 before declining in the winter. England’s first brush with what is known as the “Second Plague Pandemic” was certainly its most devastating (estimates of mortality range from 40 to 60% of the whole population) but it would not be the last. Plague reoccurred several times between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, roughly at intervals of a decade, before the final outbreak known as the Great Plague of London in 1665-6, recorded in vivid detail by Samuel Pepys.

Right through this 300-year period of plague, physicians, surgeons, and other medical practitioners reprised ancient forms of knowledge, as well as devising innovative treatments for this disease, producing a wealth of textual evidence. Treating the plague spawned its own genre of medical texts, which we refer to as “plague tracts”, which offered summaries of authoritative texts adapted for different readerships. Originally written in Latin, many of the most popular plague tracts were quickly translated in vernacular languages, and with the advent of the printing press in Europe in 1440, they could be widely disseminated in affordable pamphlets. Both printers and physicians appreciated the potential market for such publications, and new plague tracts were often produced by combining or reattributing older material, making it difficult to assign certain works or ideas to one particular author.

These plague tracts often followed a standard formula. First, they described the signs and causes of the plague. This could range from air poisoned by decaying corpses, the fumes from lakes and swamps, or even the sudden release of poisonous subterranean vapours during earthquakes. In a time when philosophers and physicians were firm believers in the influence of the planets and constellations, certain conjunctions of planets and stars were often described as either causing the plague itself, or at least making the population more susceptible to the disease. In this popular medical text The Myrrour or Glasse of Helth, published in 1545, the Dominican friar Thomas Moulton makes it clear that the plague is both a natural occurrence and a part of God’s plan to punish mankind. Moulton writes that “this sinne is cause in part of the pestilence, as [much as] the corrupt ayre and the venime thereof, the whyche was caused by a conjunction of Saturn and Iovis [Jupiter]”. It is not the case for Moulton that he accepts any one account of the plague’s origins over another. For him, it is simultaneously a divine judgement, a natural poison in the air, and the result of the positions of the planets.

The title page of Thomas Moulton’s The Myrrour or Glasse of Helth.

While the plague was novel because of its devastatingly high mortality rate, it is not the case that medical practitioners had no frame of reference. Faced with the epidemic, they turned to trusted ancient sources, such as Galen of Pergamon’s account of the plague which struck the Roman Empire between 165 and 180 AD, now known as the Antonine Plague. Most physicians agreed that the disease was a type of fever known as pestilential fever. Fevers were one of the most commonly diagnosed and described classes of disease in premodern medicine. Fevers were classified according to the length of time between the regular appearance of symptoms, with a “tertian” fever reoccurring every three days, a “quartan” every four, or they depended on where they were seated in the body, with “hectic fevers” in the solid parts of the body, and “putrid fevers” in the fluid humours.

Pestilential fevers, however, were of a different kind. Instead of originating from humoral disturbances within the body, the unnatural heat that characterised fevers came from unhealthy matter entering from outside. Dangerous vapours produced from swamps, dead bodies, and collected filth were believed to enter the body through the mouth and the pores of the skin, attacking the heart, which was the centre of the body’s natural heat. The action of these pestilential fevers was seen as evidence that, unlike other febrile conditions, conditions such as the plague were a form of poisoning. The treatments we find for plague outbreaks often focus on ways of preventing this poison from entering the body, or on ways of removing the toxic matter from the body.

Approaching some of the recipes and treatments in the plague literature from this perspective helps even the most outlandish and superstitious-seeming recommendations seem more rooted in the medical logic of the time.

One such case is Thomas Phaer’s discussion of what historians of medicine often call the “Live Chicken Cure”. Phaer (1510 – 1560) wrote the earliest English treatise on paediatrics, The Boke of Chyldren (1545), as well as being an accomplished translator of French and Latin works. The RCS England Library holds a copy of Phaer’s popular plague tract The Regiment of Lyfe, whereunto is added a treatise of the pestilence, published in 1567. Like Thomas Moulton’s Myrrour, Phaer’s book consisted of older works which he had translated, including a popular regimen by the French royal physician Jean Goeurot (1501-1552), which contained recipes for simple medications and dietary advice. To this he added his own work on paediatrics, and Nicolas de Houseemaine’s Regimen against the Plague, giving his work a timely appeal in the context of the several plague outbreaks of the mid-16^th century.

The title page of Thomas Phaer’s The Regiment of Lyfe, whereunto is added a treatise of the pestilence.

The recipes which Phaer translated into English show how plague treatments were focused on extracting the poisonous material which was blamed for the disease, which put the treatments firmly in the province of the surgeons. Surgeons, despite their primary focus on the physical manipulation of the bones, tissues, and organs, had recourse to a wide variety of pharmaceutical treatments which were applied to the exterior of the body, usually in the form of plasters. These came in several types, including “maturatives”, designed to speed the healing of a wound or ulcer, or “repercussive”, which would reduce swelling by driving fluids away from a certain part of the body.

A contemporary woodcut image of a hen “Gallina” from Conrad Gessner”s Icones auium omnium, 1606.

In the chapter on the “application of outward medicine”, Phaer advises the surgeon that “ye muste apply your labour to take awaye the residue of the venime, that remaineth in the body”. As such he warns that in treating the Plague, “not maner plaister repercussive may be set upon any botch [buboe] of pestilence”, as this would simply drive back the poisonous material that the body was attempting to excrete. Instead, he recommends a method of for drawing out the poisons by transferring them to a chicken.

take a cocke and pull ye fethers of about hys foundament, & put a lytle salt in it, & set hys foundament upon ye said botch, keping hym on a good whyle, stoppynge many times his byll, ye his breath may bee retained, & let hym blow againe.

No physician these days would recommend holding the rear end of a chicken onto a pustule for any length of time. However, within the context of medieval understandings of physiology, this treatment offered a relatively non-invasive way to extract the poisonous matter from the bubo. As mentioned above, medieval medicine held that the skin was a highly permeable surface, and that air and other substances could pass through its pores. By removing the feathers from the chicken, its skin could be placed in direct contact with the surface of the plague pustule. “Stoppynge many times his byll”, that is to say, holding shut its beak, would encourage the pores of the chicken to take in more air, and therefore, draw the corrupt matter out of the patient. The treatment was completed when the chicken died. Phaer warned, however, that “ye must commaunde them ye take them [the chicken] off, to cast them in ye fire, & not to take the savour [i.e. not to eat it] when it is removed” for now being full of poisonous matter, “that is very daungerous”.

A contemporary woodcut image of a hen “Capo” from Conrad Gessner”s Icones auium omnium, 1606.

The historian Erik Heinrichs has analysed the history of the so-called “live chicken treatment”, and notes a number of variations between different regions and time periods. Some pamphlets specify to hold the chicken’s beak for the duration of the procedure, meaning that it can only be held on the bubo for the amount of time it takes to asphyxiate. This requires several chickens which are applied one after the other to extend the treatment time, with one manuscript dated to 1405 calling for seven chickens an hour for a whole day.

The particular variation suggested by Phaer appears to be more economical. The recipe calls for holding the chicken’s beak for a time, and then “let hym blow [breath] againe”. This extends the time before the chicken dies, reducing the number of chickens needed for the procedure. This adaptation makes sense given the concern within the rest of text on caring for the poor. Many of his recipes include variations made up of cheaper and more readily available ingredients, and he addresses surgeons directly, saying “I humbly desire them to have some pyty of the poore, that be diseased, and not to fauoure them that have ynough, but rather take so much of ye riche, and they may ye better have wherwyth to helpe the nedy”. The variation of the live chicken treatment thus minimises the number of chickens which must be killed (and rendered inedible), reducing the financial impact of treatment on patients.

Phaer’s tract neatly represents some of the major trends in sixteenth-century medical writing. The Regiment of Lyfe was designed with the potential market in mind, combining handy medical advice for families with topical information about treatments for plague outbreaks. While all three texts that constitute the Regiment are attributed to Phaer, like many other printed plague tracts, the work is a complex composite of translations, retranslations, and original material. It thus acts as a witness to the social realities of medical care in the period; the market was a key driver of the kinds of medical texts that were printed, and the recipes and cures they contained had to have an awareness of the economic circumstances of their audiences.

Further reading

For more on plague literature from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, listen to the podcast episode The travels and transformations of John of Burgundy’s Plague Tract with historian of medicine Dr Lori Jones.

For more on the “live chicken treatment”, see: Heirichs, Erik A. “The Live Chicken Treatment for Buboes: Trying a Plague Cure in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 2017; 91(2): 210–232.

Thomas Banbury, Henry Lumley Collections Engagement Grant holder, 2025-2026