"When the plague hit Geneva in 1530, everything was ready. A whole hospital with doctors, paramedics and nurses was opened for the plague patients. Merchants were assembling, the magistrate gave subsidies every month. Patients always gave money, and if one of them died alone, all his belongings went to the hospital.
Then came the catastrophe: the plague was burned out, and the subsidies depended on the number of sick people.
There was no right or wrong question for the staff of the Geneva hospital in 1530. If the plague makes money, the plague is good. And then the doctors organized themselves.
At first, they just poisoned patients to raise their mortality stats, but quickly realized that the stats shouldn't only be about mortality, but also plague mortality. So they started cutting boils out of the bodies of the dead, drying them, grinding them in a mortar and giving them to other sick people as medicine. Then the powder began to be sprinkled on clothes, handkerchiefs and garters. But the plague continued to wane. Apparently the dried boils didn't work well.
So the doctors went to the city and at night they poured powder on the door handles, choosing those houses on which they could then earn money. As one eyewitness wrote to these events, "it has been hidden for a while, but the devil is more concerned with increasing the number of sins than with hiding them."
In short, one of the doctors became so brazen and lazy that he decided not to roam the city at night, but to simply throw a bundle of dust into the crowd during the day. The stench rose to heaven, and one of the girls, who by luck had recently left the hospital, discovered what the smell was.
The doctor was tied up and put into the good hands of competent "artisans".
They tried to get as much information as possible from him. However, the execution lasted for several days.
The ingenious Hippocrates were tied to poles on carts and driven around the city. At each crossing, the hangmen were tearing off pieces of their bodies with red-hot tweezers. Then they were taken to a public square, their heads were decapitated and dismembered, and the pieces were shipped to all districts of Geneva. The only exception was the son of a hospital director who did not attend the trial but reported that he knew how to make potions and how to prepare the powder without fear of contamination. He was beheaded 'to prevent the spread of evil'.
Source
Sounds familiar?
