You’ve probably seen them while scrolling through history threads or late-night Wikipedia rabbit holes. Those eerie, high-contrast images of people in bird-like masks, or piles of bodies stacked in dark alleys. They get shared every time a new virus makes the news. People label them as photos of the black plague, and they usually go viral because they look terrifying.
Here is the problem. They aren't real.
At least, they aren't what people say they are. The Black Death, that world-altering pandemic caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351. Photography wasn't invented until the 1820s. You do the math. There is a 500-year gap between the "Black Death" and the first camera. If you see a grainy, black-and-white photograph claiming to show a 14th-century plague pit, you are looking at a staged reenactment, a film still, or a photo from a completely different century.
The Plague Doctor Problem
Basically, the "plague doctor" with the long beak is the face of the Black Death in popular culture. But if you're looking for photos of the black plague doctors from the 1300s, you won't find them because that outfit didn't even exist yet.
Charles de Lorme, a physician to French royalty, actually came up with the leather suit and beak mask in 1619. That is the seventeenth century. He thought the beak should be stuffed with aromatics—like mint, camphor, and dried roses—to filter out "miasma" or bad air. It was essentially a primitive, albeit cool-looking, gas mask. When you see a photo of someone in this gear, it’s usually a picture of a 19th-century carnival mask from Venice or a staged historical "re-creation" meant to look spooky.
History is messy. We want to see the horror directly, so we latch onto these images. Real photos of "the plague" do exist, but they are from the Third Pandemic, which started in China in 1855 and hit places like San Francisco and Sydney in the early 1900s.
Why We Get the Dates Wrong
It’s easy to get confused because the bubonic plague never really went away. It just kept coming back. After the big one in the 1300s, there was the Great Plague of London in 1665. Then the Third Pandemic in the late 1800s. By the time the Third Pandemic rolled around, photographers like John Thomson and those working for health boards were active.
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So, when you search for photos of the black plague, the authentic images you find are actually from the 1890s or early 1900s. These are real, and in many ways, they are more upsetting than the fake ones. They show real families being evicted in Hawaii or the destruction of Chinatown in San Francisco because officials (wrongly) thought the buildings themselves were the problem.
What Real Plague Photos Actually Show
If you look at the archives from the 1894 Hong Kong outbreak, you see the grim reality of how we used to handle pandemics. There are photos of the "Plague Ship" Hygeia, where patients were quarantined. There are shots of the "Rat Brigade" in Australia—men hired to kill thousands of rats because, by then, we finally understood that fleas on rodents were the primary vector.
One of the most famous (and often mislabeled) photos shows a man with massive swelling in his groin or armpit. Those are buboes. That is where the name "Bubonic" comes from. In these late 19th-century photos, you see the exhaustion in the eyes of the healthcare workers who were still mostly powerless.
Yersinia pestis is a nasty bit of biology. It causes lymph nodes to swell until they potentially burst. In the 1300s, people thought it was God's wrath or planetary alignment. By 1900, we had microscopes. We have photos of the bacteria itself from that era, thanks to Alexandre Yersin, who isolated it in 1894.
The Misleading Nature of "Historical" Viral Posts
You've seen the one. A grainy photo of people dancing in a circle with skeletal figures. Captions claim it's a "rare photo of the Black Death."
Nope.
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It’s usually a photo of a "Danse Macabre" theatrical performance from the early 20th century. Or it's a still from the 1957 Ingmar Bergman film The Seventh Seal. That movie is a masterpiece, but it’s not a documentary. People share these stills as "proof" of the medieval atmosphere.
Honestly, the real "photos" of the 14th-century plague are the illuminated manuscripts. They are terrifying in a different way. They show people covered in red spots, praying to saints like St. Sebastian or St. Roch. They aren't photorealistic, but they capture the psychological trauma of a society where 50% of the population died in under five years.
The San Francisco Plague of 1900
There are some very specific photos of the black plague (the Third Pandemic version) taken in California. This is a wild bit of history. When the plague hit San Francisco in 1900, the governor, Henry Gage, tried to pretend it wasn't happening. He didn't want to hurt the economy. Sound familiar?
The photos from this era show:
- Barbed wire fences cordoning off entire city blocks in Chinatown.
- Health inspectors in suits and bowler hats poking through basements.
- The burning of personal belongings in the streets.
- Mangled wooden sidewalks being torn up to reach rat nests.
These images are the closest thing we have to seeing what a plague-stricken city looks like. They show the intersection of medical fear and blatant racism, as the Chinese community was unfairly blamed for the disease.
How to Spot a Fake Plague Photo
If you’re looking at an image and trying to figure out if it’s an authentic historical record of a plague outbreak or just a "spooky" Pinterest repost, check these things.
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- The Mask: If there is a bird mask, it’s not the 1300s. Period. If the photo looks Victorian but the person is wearing a bird mask, it’s probably a costume. Real plague doctors in the 1800s didn't wear those anymore; they wore standard (for the time) medical aprons or even early versions of surgical gowns.
- The Resolution: Early photography (Daugerreotypes) required long exposure times. If you see a "plague" photo with a lot of fast-moving action—like people running or a body being thrown—it’s likely a modern recreation.
- The Clothing: Look at the spectators. If the people in the background are wearing 1920s caps or Victorian dresses, you’re looking at a later outbreak or a film set.
- The Source: Reputable archives like the Wellcome Collection or the Library of Congress have digitized thousands of real medical photos. If the image is only found on "CreepyHistory" Twitter accounts without a museum citation, be skeptical.
The Scientific Reality Behind the Images
While we don't have photos of the black plague from the Middle Ages, we do have "molecular photos." Today, scientists can extract DNA from the dental pulp of skeletons found in plague pits like the one at East Smithfield in London.
Through a process called "shotgun sequencing," researchers have reconstructed the genome of the 14th-century bacteria. We know it’s almost identical to the plague we have today. We have "photos" of the DNA strands and high-resolution electron microscope images of the modern Yersinia pestis.
It looks like a tiny, harmless jellybean. But that "jellybean" killed 25 million people in five years.
Why the Fascination Persists
We are obsessed with these images because the plague is the ultimate "invisible enemy." We want to see it. We want to put a face on it, even if that face is a leather bird mask. The photos from the late 1800s give us a bridge to that medieval horror. They show us that despite our technology—whether it was the steamship of 1900 or the wooden cart of 1348—humanity reacts to pandemics with the same mix of heroism, fear, and finger-pointing.
Actionable Steps for History Buffs
If you want to find real historical photos of plague outbreaks without getting duped by AI or movie stills, follow these steps:
- Search Digital Archives Directly: Skip Google Images. Go to the Wellcome Collection or the National Library of Medicine. Search for "Third Plague Pandemic" or "Bubonic Plague 1890s."
- Verify the "Plague Doctor": If you see a beak-masked doctor, remember the date 1619. Anything before that is a historical inaccuracy. Anything after 1900 is likely a costume.
- Look for Context: Real medical photos from the 1800s usually have a clinical feel. They were taken for science, not for "vibes." They often include a scale bar or are part of a series showing the progression of the disease.
- Check the Location: Authentic plague photos from the late 19th century are heavily concentrated in Hong Kong, Bombay (Mumbai), Sydney, and San Francisco. If an image claims to be from Paris or London in that era, double-check the outbreak records.
The Black Death was a tragedy of unimaginable scale. We don't need fake photos to make it scarier. The reality of the Third Pandemic photos—the isolation, the crumbling infrastructure, and the sheer biological resilience of the bacteria—is more than enough to tell the story.