The Diary of Caspar Kruse III, Executioner: Goslar, 24 February 1642 – Meeting with the City Physician

 The air was dry today, unnaturally dry for this time of year. No snow, no rain. Only a thin wind that swept over the cobblestones like ash. I was cleaning the yard—someone had left a pig carcass at the Abdeckerei earlier in the morning—when a boy from the Council came running, cheeks red, a piece of parchment in his hand. No seal, only the name “Keller” and a place: back room of the inn Zum Goldenen Adler.

I washed my hands, put on a clean cloak — and went.

Dr. Keller awaited me there, as written. Not in his own house, but in the privacy of an upper room in a tavern. It smelled of old wine and honeyed tobacco. He stood at the window, in the last of the winter light, looking out over Breite Straße as if he sought something that had long since vanished.

When I entered, he turned slowly. He wore no hat—rare enough—and his hair clung flat with sweat. His eyes held weariness, or something beneath it. He did not gesture to a chair. He began speaking at once:

“You tend the sick whom I do not touch.”

It was no accusation. No acknowledgement either. Only a statement, the way a physician names a symptom: baldness, fever, swelling.

I answered, hands folded behind my back:

“Because they already consider me unclean.”

He smiled—not truly—more a tremor at the corner of his mouth. As if my words confirmed what he already knew, or feared.

Then his hand slipped beneath his cloak, and he drew out three small earthen pots. No seal, no label. Only the sharp smell of sulphur, and something bitter—perhaps mugwort, perhaps comfrey.

“For the skin rot,” he said. “And the open wounds.”

I took them without a word of thanks. In our trades, the gesture counts, not the speaking.

He nodded briefly, turned back to the window — and left, without a farewell. His steps on the wooden stairs sounded slow, tired, or thoughtful.

I remained a moment. The sun was gone now, the room cold. I opened one of the pots. The salve was thick, yellow as rotting bone. I smelled it. Pure sulphur. Good for scabies, good for plague swellings. But no cure for what truly consumes those people.

I will use it. On the women with sores beneath their breasts. On the beggars with pus in their groins. On the child in Rosentorstraße whose legs are already half black. No one else touches them.

I am their last hand.




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