The Herbalist: Nicholas Culpeper and the Fight for Medical Freedom. Benjamin Woolley

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ of the College were in attendance to minister to James I during his final illness than in all of London during that deadly spring and summer of 1625. On 21 April, less than a month after the royal medical retinue had returned to the capital, the entire membership of the College was summoned to Amen Corner to undertake a solemn selection procedure to decide who should remain in the capital to deal with the epidemic. They filed into the Comitia room one by one and, before the President, Dr Atkins, named those they thought should stay to represent the College. The names that emerged were Sir William Paddy, John Argent (an ‘Elect’ or senior member of the College and soon to become its president), Simeon Foxe (another future president), and William Harvey. All the others were relieved of their collegiate duties, and most presumably fled.

      The official College line for dealing with the plague was set out in a treatise entitled Certaine Rules, Directions, or Advertisements for this Time of Pestilential Contagion, first published in 1603 at the time of the last ‘visitation’, and reissued to deal with the current one. Written by Francis Herring, a College Elect, and dedicated to the King, its first words defined the plague in terms of a Latin dictum taken from the Bible, which translated as: ‘The stroke of God’s wrath for the sins of mankind’. This view of plague as a punishment, in particular for pride, was backed up by ministers like William Attersoll, who pointed out that God sent the first plague to strike the Israelites for ‘rebelliously contending against the high Priest, and the chiefest Magistrate to whom God committed the oversight of all’. ‘This is not only the opinion of Divines,’ Herring continued, ‘but of all learned Physicians … Therefore his [the physician’s] appropriate and special Antidote is Seria paenitentia, & conversio ad Deum: unfeigned and hearty repentance, and conversion to God.’²³

      The doctors did have some medical advice to offer. ‘Eschew all perturbations of the mind, especially anger and fear’ Herring wrote. ‘Let your exercise be moderate … an hour before dinner or supper, not in the heat of the day, or when the stomach is full. Use seldom familiarity with Venus, for she enfeebleth the body.’ As for remedies, they were various, in particular ‘theriacs’ or treacles of the sort used to treat James in his final illness. Herring did not provide recipes for these – it would break the College statutes to do so, and in any case he expected those educated and rich enough to read his treatise to consult a physician. However, he did provide a set of basic remedies for treating those too poor to afford medical fees. The aim of these was to produce beneficial sweating at various intervals in the illness’s development. They could be made at home and included ingredients that were relatively easy to get hold of, such as radish, caraway seeds, and ‘middle or six-shilling beer’.

      Herring also provided advice to the city authorities, in particular relating to the matter of hygiene in public spaces. The College had a low opinion of urban health standards, noting the multitude of ‘annoyances’ that had been allowed to develop and which now aided the epidemic’s spread. Rampant development had produced overcrowding, ‘by which means the air is much offended and provision is made more scarce which are the two prime means of begetting or increasing the plague’; there was ‘neglect of cleansing of Common Sewers and town ditches and the permitting of standing ponds in diverse Inns which are very offensive to the near inhabiting neighbours’. More offensive still were the ‘laystalls’ or dumping and burial grounds accumulating beyond the city’s northern limit. Over the city wall at Bishopsgate or Moorgate lay an unsavoury landscape of fens, shacks, kilns, compost heaps, plantations, ruined abbeys, rubbish piles, firing ranges, laundries, dog houses, and pig stalls. This was the world of Bedlam, the famous hospital for mental patients, and the Finsbury windmills, built atop a vast heap of human remains excavated from a charnel house next to Amen Corner. This would also become the setting for Nicholas Culpeper’s practice, and where he and his comrades would muster for the future fight against the sovereign the physicians now served. As far as the physicians were concerned, the whole area was the brewery of infection. From this wasteland the ‘South Sun’ drew ‘ill vapours cross the City’, polluting the north wind, ‘which should be the best cleanser and purifier of the City’. It was upon these dumps of ‘well rotted’ waste that the city gardens were gorged, ‘making thereby our cabbages and many of our herbs unwholesome’.²⁴

      In response to such complaints, the authorities drew up a series of emergency ‘Orders to be used in the time of the infection of the plague within the City and Liberties of London’. The aim was to deal with the situation ‘till further charitable provision may be had for places of receipt for the visited with infection’ – in other words, in anticipation of an evacuation of plague victims to surrounding pest hospitals, a monumental undertaking which the authorities were not prepared to pay for out of city funds. The orders focused primarily on identifying sites of infection and sealing them off. Any house or shop in which a resident had died of, or become infected with, the plague was to be shut up for twenty-eight days, and over the door ‘in a place notorious and plain for them that pass to see it, the Clerk or sexton of the 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 СКАЧАТЬ