Plague: from palæopathology to wax modelling

Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death (ca. 1562, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain), similarly to its Panormitan counterpart (Palazzo Abatellis, ca. 1446), is a perfect representation of the utter devastation brought about by plague, a most terrifying infectious disease capable of manifesting itself in a pandemic form, hence becoming synonymous with the word ‘apocalypse’. Bruegel’s painting so vividly depicts the horrors of such a catastrophe in its human, social, political and religious dimensions, especially at a time when scientific knowledge of the causes, clinical presentation and potential therapies were still heavily limited, hence leaving Europe’s population completely vulnerable to this scourge, in this artwork exemplified by a human skeleton, the personification of Death, caught in the act of riding an emaciated horse.Such epoch-making disasters offer contemporary students of the history of medicine a tremendously effective comparison with the sufferings and problems encountered when facing similar situations in our own world, just as it is happening with the present COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, by expanding one’s knowledge of the dynamics and the very morphology of these complex pathological phenomena...