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One of the most intriguing plague treatments of late medieval and early modern Europe calls for applying the rumps of live chickens to a bubo in order to draw out poisons. The Augsburg physician Ambrosius Jung offered a common version of this "live chicken" treatment in his printed plague treatise of 1494:
Some take young roosters, one after the other, with the feathers plucked from around the hole in the backside. Place the rooster's rump on the bubo until the rooster dies. Repeat with another rooster until one survives.1
Historians cannot dismiss this treatment, as strange as it sounds, as simply bizarre due to its prevalence and longevity within the plague treatises composed by physicians between 1348 and the eighteenth century. It appeared throughout Europe from England to the Ottoman Empire and achieved such status in the sixteenth century that it was "appropriately advised and praised by all doctors," according to one south German physician.2 The "live chicken" treatment was also more than just a thought experiment, since it entered medical practice by the sixteenth century, if not earlier. Despite a long trail of evidence, historians have not investigated the treatment's origin, workings, and longevity. Its history, however, sheds light on the thought and practice of physicians as they tested and altered traditional recipes for a new era of plagues after 1348.
This article traces a seven-hundred-year history of the "live chicken" treatment, starting with Avicenna's Canon of Medicine of the eleventh century and ending in the eighteenth century as plague disappeared from Western Europe. This investigation has three goals: (1) to explain the origin and workings of the "live chicken" treatment within the context of contemporary medical thought, (2) to interpret the many novel variants of the treatment that arose during these many centuries, and (3) to assess the treatment's relationship to practical medicine, especially as this relationship seems to change over time. This article argues that most variations of the treatment likely resulted from physicians trying ideas on paper, rather than in practice, as they attempted to unlock the mysteries of the plague's underlying poisons.3 Even though this way of trying cures was speculative, it added a dynamic element to late medieval and early modern plague treatises, as physicians...