The irregular practitioners of physic would appear to have been in great force, just as in former plagues, when their bills were on every post. Defoe professes to give specimens of their advertisements, which he might have adapted from actual advertisements in the news-sheets, the ‘Intelligencer’ and the ‘Newes.’ The empirics were of both sexes, and of foreign extraction as well as native.
Among the regular physicians who practised for a time, at least, in the plague were the famous Professor Glisson, Dr Nathan Paget (an intimate friend of Milton and cousin of Elizabeth Minshull whom the poet, in 1664, had married for his third wife), Dr Wharton, of St Thomas’s Hospital, a distinguished anatomist, Dr Berwick or Barwick, Dr Brooke, Dr Hodges, and Dr Conyers. The last was one of two of his order who died of the plague. Two Paracelsist or chemical physicians, Dr Dey and Dr Starkey, died of it: and Dr George Thomson says that he survived three several attacks of the buboes, the first sore lasting for four months. A considerable number of chirurgeons and apothecaries are said (by Defoe) to have fallen victims. Pepys says that at the first meeting of Gresham College (the Royal Society) since the plague, held on January 22, 1666, Dr Goddard “did fill us with talk in defence of his and his fellow physicians’ going out of town in the plague-time,” his plea being that their particular patients were out of town, and they left at liberty. But that excuse ignores the fact that the time was a great emergency, and puts the defence upon the wrong ground.
Goddard had attended Cromwell in the Irish and Scottish campaigns as physician to the army. For a short time he had been a member of the Council of State, and for several years was master of a College at Oxford. He was Gresham professor of physic, and one of the original council of the Royal Society. This eminent man of science was the inventor and proprietor of “Goddard’s drop,” the secret of which he sold to Charles II. for a large sum, said to have been £6000. Dr Martin Lister says that the king showed him the receipt, and that the drops were nothing more than the volatile spirit of raw silk rectified with oil of cinnamon, and no better than ordinary spirit of hartshorn. Another writer says that the drops contained also skull of a person hanged and dried viper. According to Sydenham, Goddard’s drops were preferable to other volatile spirits for the particular purpose, namely, the recovery of people from faintings of various kinds. Even if Dr Goddard had remained in town, he would have been a trafficker in nostrums as much as the empirics; nor is it probable, from all that we know, that he could have brought epidemiological principles to bear upon the management of the epidemic among the poor. The best teaching of the time counselled that which he himself practised, namely, flight.
Defoe says that the Lord Mayor (Sir John Lawrence), the Sheriffs (Sir George Waterman and Sir Charles Doe), the Court of Aldermen and certain of the Common Council, or their deputies, came to a resolution and published it, viz.:
“That they would not quit the City themselves, but that they would be always at hand for the preserving of good order in every place, and for the doing justice on all occasions; as also for the distributing the public charity to the poor; and, in a word, for the doing the duty and discharging the trust reposed in them by the citizens to the utmost of their power.”
The minutes are extant of numerous meetings of the Mayor and Council, with the orders made (on May 11, June 17, 19, and 27, July 12, and at short intervals thereafter)[1212]. Two of the Aldermen died of plague.
It appears to be admitted by all, that good order was kept, the dead buried expeditiously, day and night watchmen provided for an immense number of infected houses (until, as Vincent says, the infected houses became so many that there was no use shutting them up), bearers of the dead and grave-diggers engaged to fill the places of those who died, and applications heard for relief. One of the things that justly excited the admiration of Defoe was the abundant supply of all the markets, and the almost unvarying weight of the penny wheaten loaf, which is given every week at the foot of the bill of mortality. The Parish Clerks brought out their bill regularly, although Hodges says that the sextons failed at length to keep an accurate account of the number of corpses. All the dead were buried at first in coffins and with full ceremony; but when the infection became hottest in August and September, especially in the crowded East-end and in Southwark, the bodies are said to have been brought to the pits in cartloads and thrown in, sometimes without even a covering[1213]. That is alleged by the writers on the plagues of 1603 and 1625, and the same must have happened to some extent in 1665, but whether to the extent that Defoe’s graphic account implies may be doubted.
The burials took place over night until, as Vincent says, “now the nights are too short to bury the dead.” This was a reversal of the order, first issued in 1547 and probably carried out in the plague of 1603, that no burial was to take place between six in the evening and six in the morning. Even at the worst time, coffins would seem to have been got for most. Vincent says, “Now we could hardly go forth but we should meet many coffins,” and he mentions one woman whom he met with a little coffin under her arm. Evelyn enters in his diary on September 7, the worst week of the epidemic: “I went all along the City and suburbs from Kent Street to St James’s, a dismal passage and dangerous, to see so many coffins exposed in the streets now thin of people.” Defoe’s weird description of the Aldgate plague-pit at midnight, with seven or eight lanterns set on the heaps of earth round the edge, and of the constant journeys to and fro of the dead-carts, has probably made the most of the realities of the case.
A letter of Pepys to Lady Carteret, written from Woolwich on September 4, gives us a glimpse of the state of the City:
“I having stayed in the city till about 7400 died in one week, and of them above 6000 of the plague, and little noise heard day nor night but tolling of bells; till I could walk Lumber-Street and not meet twenty persons from one end to the other, and not fifty upon the Exchange; till whole families, 10 and 12 together, have been swept away; till my very physician, Dr Burnet, who undertook to secure me against any infection, having survived the month of his own being shut up, died himself of the plague; till the nights, though much lengthened, are grown too short to conceal the burials of those that died the day before, people being thereby constrained to borrow daylight for that service.” The butcheries are everywhere visited, his brewer is shut up, and his baker dead with his whole family.