Journal of a Plague Doctor

Day two

June 8, 1347

          I have bad news to report. In fact, it is the worst news I have ever had to report in my life. The men that appeared yesterday are all dead. Before they died, they were cared for, and many people tried to help them, to cure them. I was invited to their temporary home, being a doctor. I was the one giving them treatment when they died. I used all the techniques I use to cure others of illness, but none of them worked. The humors in their bodies refused to balance themselves. I was bleeding one man for a bloodletting treatment, when I heard a scream of agony from one of the other patients. I turned around, to try and help him, and I saw the most sickening image I had ever seen. He was having spasms, his eyes rolling wildly in their sockets, and screaming the most deafening scream. Then, suddenly, he became limp and was dead. I turned back around to help the man I was bleeding, to stop the process of bloodletting, but he was dead, too. He had lost too much of one humor, blood, and it had killed him. I had murdered a man, and witnessed a dance of death. It is not as if I have not had patients die during treatment before, but this time... it was much more traumatizing. I had just witnessed a man die a horrible death, in complete and utter agony, and then the man I was supposed to be saving from that fate died while I was distracted. I had to leave that place before I witnessed any more death. As I left, I heard more screams from the men, and I knew they were gone. "I am sorry I could not save you." I whispered as I left. Those words have been ringing in my ears ever since, along with the screams of dying men, the men that I had left to die. I have failed as a doctor.