The beaked mask wasn’t just for show—it was packed with herbs to ward off “bad air.” Underneath it? One of the most haunting jobs in history.

A cosplayer wearing the long, black nose of a plague doctor poses with a woman in a face mask for a ...More photo at the Middle East Film & Comic Con in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Thursday ...

It’s not as a doctor plying noble trade that has given the costume its staying power. Plague equaled death, and when you have black garbed doctors roaming around with giant protruding mask noses ...

The plague doctor costume looks like a cross between a steampunk crow and the Grim Reaper, and has come to represent both the terrors of the Black Death and the foreignness of medieval medicine.

Cops in the English village of Hellesdon are hunting for an unidentified individual who's been creeping out locals by lurking around town while dressed as a 17th Century plague doctor.

“That plague doctor mask with the pointy nose, it’s brown,” Cameron says. “Of course, plague says it all, so I think they just want to show people that they’re in the mood. ...

During the 17th-century European plague, physicians wore beaked masks, leather gloves, and long coats in an attempt to fend off the disease. Their iconic and ominous look, as depicted in this 1656 ...

School officials called the police when a teenager showed up at a Malden high school in a plague doctor costume Tuesday morning. No weapons were found on the 14-year-old, but school officials ...