While plague was thus raging in the poor skirts of the City, “paring them off by little and little,” the well-to-do within the walls took alarm and fled, “some riding, some on foot, some without boots, some in slippers, by water, by land, swarm they westwards. Hackneys, watermen and waggons were not so terribly employed many a year; so that within a short time there was not a good horse in Smithfield, nor a coach to be set eyes on.” But they might just as well have remained as trust themselves to the “unmerciful hands of the country hard-hearted hobbinolls.” The sight of a Londoner’s flat-cap was dreadful to a lob: a treble ruff threw a whole village into a sweat. A crow that had been seen on a sunshiny day standing on the top of Powles would have been better than a beacon on fire, to have raised all the towns within ten miles of London for the keeping her out. One Londoner set out for Bristol, thinking not to see his home again this side Christmas. But forty miles from town the plague came upon him, and he sought entrance to an inn. When his case was known, the doors of the inn “had their wooden ribs crushed to pieces by being beaten together; the casements were shut more close than an usurer’s greasy velvet pouch; the drawing windows were hanged, drawn, and quartered; not a crevice but was stopt, not a mouse-hole left open.” The host and hostess tumbled over each other in their flight, the maids ran out into the orchard, the tapster into the cellar. The unhappy Londoner was helped by a fellow-citizen who appeared on the scene, and was carried to die on a truss of straw in the corner of a field; but the parson and the clerk refused him burial, and he was laid in a hole where he had died. According to Stow, Bamford, and Davies of Hereford, such experiences of fugitive Londoners were repeated everywhere in the country, and Dekker gives several other tales of the same sort “to shorten long winter nights.”
Meanwhile, Dekker goes on, the plague had entered the gates of the City and marched through Cheapside; men, women, and children dropped down before him, houses were rifled, streets ransacked, rich men’s coffers broken open and shared amongst prodigal heirs and unworthy servants. Every house looked like St Bartholomew’s Hospital and every street like Bucklersbury: (“the whole street called Bucklersbury,” says Stow, “on both sides throughout is possessed of grocers, and apothecaries towards the west end thereof”), for poor Mithridaticum and Dragon-water were bought in every corner, and yet were both drunk every hour at other men’s cost. “I could make your cheeks look pale and your hearts shake with telling how some have had eighteen sores at one time running upon them, others ten or twelve, many four and five; and how those that have been four times wounded by this year’s infection have died of the last wound, while others, hurt as often, are now going about whole.” Funerals followed so close that three thousand mourners went as if trooping together, with rue and wormwood stuffed into their ears and nostrils, looking like so many boars’ heads stuck with branches of rosemary. A dying man was visited by a friendly neighbour, who promised to order the coffin; but he died himself an hour before his infected friend. A churchwarden in Thames Street, on being asked for space in the churchyard, answered mockingly that he wanted it for himself, and he did occupy it in three days.
One more extract from Dekker will bring us back to the strictly medical history:
“Never let any man ask me what became of our Phisitions in this massacre. They hid their synodical heads as well as the proudest, and I cannot blame them, for their phlebotomies, losinges and electuaries, with their diacatholicons, diacodions, amulets and antidotes, had not so much strength to hold life and soul together as a pot of Pinder’s ale and a nutmeg. Their drugs turned to durt, their simples were simple things. Galen could do no more good than Sir Giles Goosecap. Hippocrate, Avicen, Paracelsus, Rasis, Fernelius, with all their succeeding rabble of doctors and water-casters, were at their wits’ end; for not one of them durst peep abroad.”
Only a band of desperadoes, he goes on, some few empirical madcaps—for they could never be worth velvet caps—clapped their bills upon every door. But besides the empirical desperadoes, who dared the infection for the sake of the golden harvest, some few physicians and surgeons remained at their post, or at least put out essays with prescriptions and rules of regimen. Three such books on the plague were published in London in 1603, of which the most notable was one by Dr Thomas Lodge[926], a poet like Dekker himself, but of the academical school to which Dekker did not belong. The passage quoted about the impotence of the faculty is perhaps aimed at these books, which all abound with the sayings and maxims of Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, and the like, Lodge also quoting the more obscure name of Fernelius, which Dekker has not failed to seize upon.
Lodge confirms the statement about the empirical desperadoes clapping their bills upon every post. One of them, “who underwrit not his bills,” posted them close to Lodge’s house in Warwick Lane, so that the physician was taken by the populace to be himself the advertiser. He was besieged with applicants for his cordial waters, and wrote his book to make his own position clear, being “aggrieved because of that loathsome imposition which was laid upon me to make myself vendible (which is unworthy a liberal and gentle mind, much more ill-beseeming a physician and philosopher), who ought not to prostitute so sacred a profession so abjectly.” Farther confirming Dekker about the greed of the quacks as well as about the strictly business-like attitude of the regular profession, he speaks of “my poor countrymen left without guide or counsel how to succour themselves in extremity; for where the infection most rageth, there poverty reigneth among the commons, which, having no supplies to satisfy the greedy desires of those that should attend them, are for the most part left desolate to die without relief.” The reader must wonder, he says, “why, amongst so many excellent and learned physicians of this city, I alone have undertaken to answer the expectation of the multitude, and to bear the heavy burthen of contentious critiques and depravers.” The explanation was that the regular faculty had for the most part gone out of town, along with magistrates, ministers and rich men. Bamford, the minister of St Olave’s, Southwark, who remained at his post, has no excuse to offer for magistrates or for his clerical brethren, but he is extremely fair to the doctors: “As for physicians, I only propound this question: Whether they be bound in conscience to be resident, in regard of their profession and ability to do good, or they may use their liberty for themselves and (as they think) for their lives, in regard they are no public persons and live (not by a common stipend but) by what they can get.”
Dr Lodge, who dated his book from Warwick Lane on August 19, or when the epidemic would have been at its height, had already won laurels in the field of poetry and romance. He was an Oxonian (Trinity College, 1573) and one of a set with Marlowe and Greene. “At length his mind growing serious,” says Anthony Wood, “he studied physic,” travelling abroad for the purpose and graduating M.D. at Avignon. He had great success in practice, especially among Catholics, to whom he was suspected of belonging. He died of the plague, during the next great epidemic of 1625, at Low Leyton in Essex. His book on the plague would be entitled to a place in medical literature if only that its style is above the average of medical compositions. I cannot forbear quoting the following collect for its structure and euphony:
“But before I prosecute this my intended purpose, let us invocate and call upon that divine bounty, from whose fountain head of mercy every good and gracious benefit is derived, that it will please him to assist this my labor and charitable intent, and so to order the scope of my indevour, that it may redound to his eternal glory, our neighbours’ comfort, and the special benefit of our whole country; which, being now under the fatherly correction of Almighty God, and punished for our misdeeds by his heavy hand, may through the admirable effects and fruits of the sacred art of physic, receive prevention of their danger, and comfort in this desperate time of visitation. To him therefore, King of kings, invisible and only wise, be all honor, majesty and dominion, now and for ever. Amen.”
It is only in dealing with the more public aspects of the plague that Lodge shows any individuality. So far as concerns causes, prognostications, symptoms, remedies, preventives, and precautions, there is little in his essay which is not to be found in the older plague-books, such as the 14th century one of the bishop of Aarhus, his anatomical directions for blood-letting being word for word the same as the bishop’s. Some of his points are the same as in Skene’s Edinburgh essay of 1568, such as the indication of plague about to begin which is got from rats, moles and other underground creatures forsaking their holes. To keep off the infection he advises the wearing of small cakes of arsenic in the armpits, where the buboes usually came. That Paracelsist practice is known to have been tried at Zurich in 1564; it was one of the matters of dispute between the Galenists and the chemical physicians. During the plague of 1603, Dr Peter Turner published a curious tract in defence of it[927].
From a Venetian gentleman Lodge obtained also the formula of a preservative from infection, which contained, among other things, tormentilla root, white dittany, bole Armeniac and oriental pearl: “The gentleman that gave me this assured me that he had given it to many in the time of the great plague in Venice, who, though continually conversant in the houses of those that were infected, received no infection or prejudice by them.”