Imagine waking up to find a hard, painful lump the size of an apple under your arm. It’s purple. It’s oozing. By lunchtime, you have a fever so high you’re hallucinating, and by tomorrow, your skin is turning black in patches. This wasn't a horror movie; it was 1348. People were desperate. When we talk about cures for the Black Death in medieval times, it’s easy to laugh at the "madness" of the past, but these people weren't stupid. They were terrified and working with the best medical theories they had, even if those theories involved lancing boils and rubbing them with chopped-up pigeons.
The mortality rate was staggering. Some cities lost 60% of their population in months.
Medicine back then was built on "Galenism." Basically, doctors believed the body was a delicate balance of four liquids called humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. If you got sick, your humors were out of whack. The Plague was seen as the ultimate imbalance, caused by "miasma"—corrupt, stinking air. If the air was the enemy, the cure had to be something that cleaned the air or rebalanced the body's internal fluids. It was a logical system, even if it was totally wrong about the Yersinia pestis bacterium.
Smelling Your Way to Health
Because they thought "bad air" caused the plague, the most common cures for the Black Death in medieval times involved smells. Fragrance was medicine. If you were wealthy, you carried a pomander—a perforated metal ball filled with ambergris, musk, or expensive spices. The idea was to create a "scented shield" around your nose.
Poor people? They used what they had.
They carried bunches of herbs like wormwood or rosemary. In some of the more extreme (and frankly, gross) cases, doctors suggested sitting near a literal latrine. Why? The logic was that the "strong" smell of human waste might overcome or "neutralize" the plague miasma. It sounds insane, but in a world where you can't see germs, fighting one bad smell with another was a legitimate tactic.
The Fire Shield
Pope Clement VI stayed alive in Avignon by sitting between two massive, roaring fires, even in the blistering heat of summer. His physicians told him the heat would "purify" the air. It actually worked, though not for the reason they thought. The intense heat kept fleas—the real carriers of the plague—away from his person. It was a lucky coincidence that probably saved the papacy.
Blood, Pus, and Poultry
The most hands-on cures for the Black Death in medieval times were surgical. These were messy. If you had a bubo (that’s the swollen lymph node), the goal was to get the "poison" out.
Barber-surgeons would use a lancet to slice the swelling open.
Then came the poultices. One popular recipe involved a mixture of tree resin, roots, and dried human excrement. If that didn't work, there was the "Vicary Method," named after Thomas Vicary. You’d take a live chicken, pluck its backside bare, and strap the bird’s bare skin directly onto the open plague sore. The belief was that the chicken would "breathe" in the poison, drawing the disease out of the human and into the bird.
Did it work? No.
Usually, the chicken just died of stress or infection, and the patient ended up with a secondary staph infection on top of the plague.
The Alchemical "Cures" and Poisonous Potions
If you were rich, you didn't just want herbs; you wanted "the good stuff." This led to the consumption of some truly lethal cocktails. One of the most famous was "Thierac," a complex medicinal paste that could contain up to 80 different ingredients, including ground-up snake skin and opium. It was essentially a medieval "cure-all" that cost a fortune.
Then there was the literal gold.
Physicians would sometimes prescribe "aurum potabile"—drinkable gold. They believed that because gold was "perfect" and didn't corrode, it would grant the body some of that perfection. In reality, drinking ground-up metals often caused heavy metal poisoning, speeding up the patient's demise.
- Vinegar Washes: People would wash their money and letters in vinegar. This was actually one of the few effective practices, as the acidity could kill some bacteria on surfaces.
- The Four Thieves Vinegar: Legend says four thieves robbed the bodies of plague victims but never got sick. Their secret? A concoction of vinegar infused with garlic, cloves, and rosemary.
- Crushed Emeralds: Some doctors suggested grinding up emeralds and drinking them in a glass of wine. If you could afford it, you did it. It mostly just caused internal tearing of the digestive tract.
The Spiritual Path: Scourging and Prayer
We have to remember that in the 14th century, science and religion weren't separate. Most people believed the plague was a literal "Arrow of God," a punishment for the world's sins. Therefore, the ultimate cures for the Black Death in medieval times were spiritual.
This led to the Flagellant movement.
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Groups of men would wander from town to town, stripped to the waist, whipping themselves with iron-tipped cords until they bled. They did this for 33 and a half days—one day for each year of Christ’s life. They thought that if they punished themselves enough, God would see their penance and stop the plague. Unfortunately, they mostly just spread the disease faster by moving between towns and leaving trails of blood and open wounds.
What Actually Worked (By Accident)
While the medical "cures" were mostly useless, the social responses were accidentally brilliant. The word "quarantine" comes from the Italian quaranta giorni, meaning 40 days. Venice was the first to realize that if you kept ships and people away from the city for 40 days, the plague didn't break out.
They didn't know why. They just saw the pattern.
By separating the healthy from the sick, they were performing the first large-scale epidemiological intervention in history. They also began clearing the streets of garbage and human waste, not because they knew about bacteria, but because they hated the smell. Less garbage meant fewer rats. Fewer rats meant fewer fleas.
Why It Finally Stopped
The Black Death didn't end because of a magic potion or a holy miracle. It "ended" because it ran out of people to kill, and because humans slowly adapted. The Rattus rattus (black rat) was eventually displaced by the Rattus norvegicus (brown rat), which stayed further away from humans. People also started building houses out of brick instead of wood and straw, which gave rats fewer places to hide.
Actionable Insights for the History Obsessed
If you’re researching cures for the Black Death in medieval times for a project, a novel, or just out of morbid curiosity, here are the key takeaways to remember about the reality of the era:
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- Context is King: Never judge medieval doctors by modern standards. Their treatments were based on a 1,500-year-old medical system that was internally consistent, even if it lacked the microscope.
- The Miasma Myth: Understanding the "bad air" theory explains almost every weird behavior from the era, including the iconic (though slightly later) plague doctor mask.
- The Role of Class: Wealthy people died almost as often as the poor, but their "cures" (gold and gems) were often more toxic than the simple herbal remedies of the peasantry.
- Check Primary Sources: For the most accurate look at these cures, look at the "Decameron" by Boccaccio or the records of the Paris Medical Faculty from 1348. They provide the most chilling, first-hand accounts of what was actually tried.
The history of the plague is a history of human resilience. We tried everything—from chickens to gold to whips—to survive. While the cures were a failure, the attempt to understand the world through observation led to the birth of modern public health.