The other general preventive measure besides the shutting-up of “visited” houses was the burning of fires in the streets, which was also a tradition from Tudor times. The mayor loyally carried out that also; until in the beginning of autumn a concurrence of things made an end of the practice. These adverse influences were first, the heavy showers of rain, which put the fires out; secondly, the differences in medical opinion whether coal-fires or wood-fires were the better, and whether fires were to be recommended at all; and thirdly the popular perception that the fires made no difference to the progress of the epidemic.
In the way of individual protection and treatment, the College of Physicians issued a tract full of directions and prescriptions, which Boghurst says were all old, being taken from De Vigo († 1520). It is not necessarily against methods of practice that they are old; but one cannot fail to observe how closely the medieval teaching about plague, cause and cure together, was followed to the last in England: for two centuries the writers on plague reproduced the chapters and paragraphs almost without change that we find in the treatise of the bishop of Aarhus, which circulated in manuscript in England in the 15th century and was first printed about 1480. The most popular preventive was something “to smell to,” not sweet but aigre. Hence the use of civet-boxes, pouncet-boxes, and pomanders, which were made to suit all purses. There were also plague-waters, one of which, “the plague-water of Matthias,” figures among the prescriptions of the College of Physicians both in a cheap and in an expensive form. The College’s prescription “to break the tumour” is as follows:
“Take a great onion, hollow it, put into it a fig, rue cut small, and a dram of Venice treacle; put it close stopt in a wet paper, and roast it in the embers; apply it hot unto the tumour; lay three or four, one after another; let one lie three hours.”
The Paracelsist or chemical physician, Thomson, gives a prescription which brings out the mystical tendencies of that otherwise meritorious sect. It relates to a method of curing plague by means of a toad.
“The great difficulty to bring this animal to a true Zenexton lies in an exquisite preparation of it, the manner whereof that great investigator of verity, Van Helmont, hath thus delivered, as he received instructions from Butler, an Irishman who (to Helmont’s knowledge) had cured some thousands of the pest in London. He gave directions that a large Bufo, taken in the afternoon in the month of June, should be hung up by the legs, nigh the fire, over a vessel of yellow wax” etc.
Tobacco, smoked or chewed, came into great vogue in 1665 as a preservative from the plague. Hearne, the antiquary, says:
“I have been told that in the last great plague at London [1665] none that kept tobacconists shops had the plague. It is certain that smoaking it was looked upon as a most excellent preservative; in so much that even children were obliged to smoak. And I remember that I heard formerly Tom Rogers, who was yeoman beadle, say that when he was that year, when the plague raged, a schoolboy at Eaton, all the boys of that school were obliged to smoak in the school every morning, and that he was never whipped so much in his life as he was one morning for not smoaking[1215].”
The best medical details of the Great Plague come from Boghurst, who claims that the observations were all his own.
With regard to its incidence he says: “About the beginning most men got it with fuddling, surfeiting, over heating themselves, and disorderly living.” Again: “Those that married in the heat of the disease (if they had not had the disease before) almost all fell into it in a week or a fortnight after it, both in the city and in the country, of which most died, especially the men.” One of Dekker’s stories of the year 1603 is an illustration of the same thing. “It usually went through a whole kindred, though living in several places; which was the cause it swept away many whole families.... In some houses ten out of twelve died, and sixteen out of twenty.” Melancholy for the loss of friends predisposed to it, while cheerfulness and courage fortified some against it. Old people that had many sores upon them, especially carbuncles, almost all died. The natural constitution, disposition, or complexion “did much to make or mar the disease.” People with hollow eyes commonly died. Those who drank brandy and strong waters grew mad, looked about them wildly, and died quickly in two days. “All that I saw that were let blood, if they had been sick two, three, four or five days or more, died the same day.” Teeming women fared miserably; they were not more subject than others: but scarce one in forty lived (this is enlarged upon by Defoe). Many people had the spotted fever and the plague both together, and many the French pox and the plague both together, and yet both sorts commonly lived (someone says that men caught the French pox of purpose[1216]). All sorts died, but more of the good than the bad, more men than women, more of dull complexion than fair. “Of all the common hackney prostitutes of Luteners-lane, Dog-yard, Cross-lane, Baldwin-gardens, Hatton-garden and other places, the common criers of oranges, oysters, fruits etc., all the impudent drunken drabbing bayles and fellows, and many others of the rouge route, there is but few missing—verifying the testimony of Diemerbroeck that the plague left the rotten bodies and took the sound[1217].” It fell not very thick upon old people till about the middle or slake of the disease, and most in the decrease and declining of the disease. Cats, dogs, cattle, poultry, etc., were free from infection.
Some died in twelve or twenty days, but most in five or six. In summer about one-half that were sick, died; but towards winter, three of four lived. None died suddenly as stricken by lightning: “I saw none die under twenty or twenty-four hours.” After one rising, or bubo, was broke and run, commonly another and another would rise in several parts of the body, so that many had the disease upon them half a year; some risings would not break under half a year, being so deep in the flesh.