LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

parish shall cause to be set on Paper printed with these words: “Lord have mercy upon us”, in such large form as shall be appointed’. One person appointed by official parish ‘surveyors’ would be allowed out to ‘go abroad’ to buy provisions for the incarcerated residents, at all times carrying ‘in their hand openly upright in the plainest manner to be seen, one red wand of the length iii foot … without carrying it closely, or covering any part of it with their cloak or garment, or otherwise’. They were further required to always walk next to the gutter, ‘shunning as much as may be, the meeting and usual way of other people’. Those who failed to do this faced eight days locked up in a cage set beside their home.

      As to the ‘annoyances’ pointed out by the physicians, the orders called for the streets to be cleaned daily by the parish Scavenger and Raker, for dunghills to be cleared, for pavements to be mended ‘where any holes be wherein any water or filth may stand to increase corruption’, and for the owners of pumps and wells to draw each night between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. at least ten pails of water to sluice out the street gutters. On the matter of treating the sick, the orders were much less specific. They simply mentioned that a ‘treaty’ should be agreed with the College ‘that some certain and convenient number of physicians and surgeons be appointed and notified to attend for the counsel and cure of persons infected’.²⁵

      The Mayor and Aldermen published a further set of orders, hard to date, but probably in the summer of 1625. These show that the College was no longer involved in the city’s increasingly desperate measures to control the crisis. Only surgeons are mentioned, six to accompany the searchers and identify cases of plague, there having been ‘heretofore great abuse in misreporting the diseases, to the further spreading of the infection’. These new orders were more draconian than the previous ones. The surgeons were offered 12d. per body examined, ‘to be paid out of the goods of the party searched, if he be able, or otherwise by the parish’. Infected properties were to be identified, not just with a sign, but with a large red cross painted in the middle of the front door – the first appearance of what became the universal mark of contamination. No longer were appointed residents allowed out to buy necessities. Instead, everyone was to be confined indoors for a month, with a day- and a night-watchman to stand guard and fetch provisions as required, locking up the house and taking the key while away from his post.²⁶

      The physicians were left out of these orders because they had fallen out with the city authorities. This is confirmed by a meeting held at the College in 1630 to discuss a less serious outbreak, during which Harvey pointed out that there was no point in selecting a team of practitioners to advise and help city officials because during 1625 he and his colleagues had been ignored. The exact cause of the dispute is unknown, but the very fact that it had come at a time of such intense medical need shows that, on the streets at least, the physicians had become an irrelevance. Those who had disappeared became resentfully numbered among the rich ‘runaways’ attacked by Dekker, so much so that when they returned many stopped wearing their official robes in public to prevent being identified, despite reprimands from the College President. Harvey and the three lone colleagues who remained presumably treated their own patients, but they had no documented involvement in dealing with the escalating number of cases that arose among the mass of the population, which produced 593 deaths in the first week of July, 1,004 in the second, 1,819 in the third, 2,471 in the fourth, peaking at 4,463 in the third week of August.²⁷ Throughout these desperate months, Amen Corner remained empty, the Censors inactive. The only meeting to be called was convened at the house of the President, Dr Atkins, to appoint his successor.

      The inaction of the doctors left the market for medicine wide open, and the apothecaries, no longer mere Grocers but now enjoying the dignity of a Society of their own, stepped into the gaping breach. As the number of cases mounted, it was they who visited the sick and distributed the medicine. They began mass-producing Theriaca Andromache, Mithridate, and London Treacle, the physicians’ favourite antidotes. One particularly industrious apothecary managed to produce 160 lb of Mithridate in one month, enough for 15,360 doses.²⁸ These medicines included an enormous number of ingredients: animal derivatives such as deer antler and viper flesh, spices such as nutmeg and saffron, flowers such as roses and marigolds, herbs such as dittany and St John’s wort, anodynes such as opium and Malaga wine. By June, supplies of some key ingredients had run out. As required by its charter, the Society of Apothecaries consulted Harvey and his three colleagues, as the College’s official representatives, on the use of substitutes. At other times, the College insisted on the recipes in the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis being rigidly followed, but on this occasion no resistance was offered.²⁹

      The physicians had in any case tacitly accepted that the apothecaries were in charge, as they had apparently let them prescribe as well as dispense medicines on a routine basis, breaking the cardinal rule of the College’s as well as the Society’s charter. It was impractical for a handful of physicians to write bills for the thousands of patients clamouring for medical help. In Harvey’s tiny parish of St Martin’s in Ludgate, one of the worst affected, there were over 250 deaths and an unrecorded number of infections, among a population unlikely to have been much more than a thousand.³⁰ No lone physician could be expected to cope with such levels of sickness, even if the victims were able to afford his fees.

      The most obvious sign that the physicians had relinquished responsibility for dealing with the plague came in early 1626, when it had passed its height. Harvey had once more been elected a Censor, and at a meeting he attended in 1626 one John Antony appeared accused of having practised without a licence for over two years. A month later Antony returned with 8 lb of a medicine he was prescribing ‘which he handed over to the President and asked that he might be allowed to practise and connived at: which was granted to him by those present’ – an unprecedented display of tolerance.³¹

      Nehemiah Wallington the wood turner had a small shop in Little Eastcheap, between Pudding Lane and Fish Street Hill. Standing upon the doorstep in early 1625, he surveyed ‘this doleful city’, listened to the ‘bells tolling and ringing out continually’, and wondered what would become of him and his family.³²

      If the courtiers, the physicians, the rich merchants with royal monopolies, the ‘great Masters of Riches’, as Dekker called them, were the runaways, Wallington was typical of those left behind.³³ Figures are imprecise, but by the 1620s crafts- and tradesmen like him made up the bulk of London’s householders.³⁴ Their standard of living was modest, and for some barely distinguishable from poverty in bad years; but they had something few of their sort enjoyed outside London – political influence. The City could not be called democratic, but it was closer to that ideal than most other institutions of the era. Wallington and his ‘middling sort’ were ‘freemen’, citizens, with a say in the running of their livery companies (the Turners, in Wallington’s case). These companies in turn not only ran London’s government, but were bankrolling the debts James, and now Charles, had run up in their attempts to avoid having to go cap-in-hand to Parliament.

       Nehemiah’s neighbourhood. Little Eastcheap is the lane at the top of the map, here identified as ‘St Margarets patens’.

      Nehemiah Wallington shared another feature common to many Londoners of his class: he was a Puritan, and an avid reader of the Bible and biblical exegeses, such as William Attersoll’s analysis of the Book of Numbers. But where Attersoll’s rural congregation rejected theological innovation, that to which Wallington belonged thrived on it. They lapped up lectures on predestination, the role of Church government and the meaning of divine election.

      Wallington

Скачать книгу