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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 also believed in divine providence – that events on earth somehow expressed God’s will. From the moment he ‘came forth polluted into this wicked world’ in 1598, every event, from the tiniest domestic incident to the greatest international affairs, was to be investigated to see how it fitted in with God’s plan. Most Puritans understood events in this way, but Wallington took it a step further: he wrote all his deliberations down, creating a journal of human struggle amounting to over two and a half thousand pages.

      The plague of 1625 represented one of the first major episodes to be examined by Wallington in this way, and his account of it provides a vivid street-level view of what it was like for the ordinary citizens of London left behind and how they dealt with it – not just medically, but philosophically and emotionally.

      Like the College of Physicians, Wallington assumed that the plague must have been sent by God. But where the College, taking its line from the religious establishment, saw it as a ‘general humiliation of the people’, Wallington believed it was a sign of how ‘idolatry crept in by little and little’ and how ‘cunningly and craftily hath the enemies of God’s free grace brought in superstition’.³⁵ In other words, it was a divine reaction to the established Church of England being drawn dangerously back towards the idolatrous rites and doctrinaire attitudes of Catholicism. Charles I had already revealed himself to be an enemy of Puritan reform, having chosen the controversial religious conservative Robert Montagu as his theological adviser. In a book ostentatiously dedicated to Charles that appeared in 1625, Montagu had attacked ‘those Classical Puritans who were wont to pass all their Strange Determinations, Sabbatarian Paradoxes, and Apocalyptical Frenzies under the Name and Covert of the True Professors of Protestant Doctrine’.³⁶ Puritans such as Nehemiah Wallington would have found it hard not to see the distorted reflection of themselves in Montagu’s caricature and to conclude that their beliefs were under threat.

      Thus the plague could not have descended on London at a more significant or sensitive time: it was part of the unfolding struggle between the Puritan saints and the courtly sinners. Wallington had already noted, a few years before, a ‘poor man of Buckinghamshire, that went all in black clothes, with his hat commonly under his arm’ and who for the space of a year stood before the palace gates at Whitehall calling to the King ‘for woe and vengeance on all Papists’. ‘I myself have seen and heard him,’ Wallington wrote, ‘crying, Woe to London, woe to the inhabitants of London.’³⁷

      Woe indeed. In the summer months of 1625, the tolling of the bells was ceaseless, and ‘could not but make us wonder at the hand of God to be so hot round about us’. Would even Nehemiah’s godly family be touched? He certainly did not regard himself as immune. He was a sinner too, all his efforts at saintliness, set out in a list of seventy-seven articles drawn up on his twenty-first СКАЧАТЬ