The treatment seems to have been mostly in the hands of quacks. Taylor says:
“On many a post I see Quacksalvers’ bills
Like fencers’ challenges to show their skill.”
The Water-poet, being Queen’s bargeman, appears to have had a proper feeling for all constituted authorities. After denouncing the quacks, as men who “pick their living out of others’ dying,” he proceeds to eulogise the regular practitioners, forgetting to add that they were now conspicuous by their absence:
“This sharp invective no way seems to touch
The learned physicians whom I honour much.
The Paracelsists and the Galenists,
The philosophical grave Herbalists,—
These I admire and reverence, for in those
God doth dame nature’s secrets fast inclose,
Which they distribute as occasions serve.”
—the prevalence of plague not being one of the occasions for revealing the secrets entrusted to them.
The medical faculty is hardly at all in evidence the whole time. Thayre’s surgical treatise of 1603 was reprinted; while a semi-empiric, one Stephen Bradwell, the grandson of Banister, a well-known Elizabethan practitioner, published a poor essay on plague, patched up from the usual stale sources and plagiarised even from the lay dialogue of the rector of St Olave’s in 1603[1018]. Bradwell addressed the reader, on July 15 “from my study in Mugwell-street, ready to my power to do thee any pleasure.”
“I have two powders. I have also an excellent electuary. I have likewise lozenges, and rich pomanders to smell of. These are all of my grandfather’s invention, and have been proved to be admirably effectual both by his and my father’s experience. I confess they are costly; but slight means and cheap medicines (however they promise) prove as dear as death. The first powder is 12 pence a dram. The second is 3 pence a grain (the quantity is 10 or 12 grains). The electuary is 2 shillings and 6 pence an ounce, the quantity is one or two drams. There is a fellow in Distaff-lane that disperseth his bills abroad, bragging of a medicine that was my grandfather Bannister’s. My grandfather was very scrupulous of giving any special receipts to others. But if any man can say he hath any receipt of his, I am sure, if it were of any value, I have the copy of it. Because many men know that I have a whole volume of excellent receipts left me both by my grandfather and my father, and lest they should conceive me as too strict and covetous in keeping all secret to myself, I have thought fit for the common good to divulge this excellent antidote following:”—the ingredients occupying a whole page.
This enterprising tradesman had been at Oxford, where he failed to take a degree in medicine, but he was a licentiate of the College of Physicians. He is the single literary representative of the faculty, so far as appears, in 1625; and there is nothing in his essay that concerns us, except the following corroboration of a well-known character of the epidemic:
“Poor people, by reason of their great want, living sluttishly, feeding nastily on offals, or the worst and unwholesomest meats, and many times, too, lacking food altogether, have both their bodies much corrupted, and their spirits exceedingly weakened; whereby they become (of all others) most subject to this sickness. And therefore we see the plague sweeps up such people in greatest heaps.”
It is impossible to know whether any considerable proportion recovered. It appears that, as in 1603, the buboes and boils might come out in the same person more than once, and that the best chance was from their suppuration: