The Great Plague by A. Lloyd Moote

Author:A. Lloyd Moote [Moote, A. Lloyd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Map 3. London Medical Marketplace during the Great Plague

The emergency medical committee approved a single surgeon to assist each of these physicians. Dr. Hodges chose Thomas Harman, whose Finch Lane house lay in one of the most infected areas inside the walls. Dr. Witherley selected Thomas Grey, whose residence at the juncture of Fleet Street and the Strand placed him close to many infected parishes west of the wall. Recognizing the extreme danger faced by these surgeons, the Guildhall gave Harman and Grey each an advance payment of £30, promising an additional £30 at Michaelmas in September and £40 at Christmas—if they lived.

When Lady Day (March 25) arrived in 1666, the city chamberlain paid Elizabeth Grey seventy pounds for the work of her husband, “late citizen and chirurgeon of London, deceased.” Three months later Ellen Harman received thirty pounds for Edward Harman’s “care and paines in looking after the visited poore the last year.” Harman had succumbed during his first quarter of public service, and the amount paid to his widow did not come close to the life pension that the college had requested. The law of averages had not been kind to the Harman and Grey couples. In lancing a bubo, a surgeon risked a deadly infection, leaving his companion a widow and possibly beholden to their parish for financial relief.

Grey and Harman were the first in a brave line of surgical defense. As the plague moved through the metropolis, the Guildhall appointed two more surgical assistants and published appeals for additional medical workers. Isolation wards were nonexistent, and many local residents near Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital were induced to take in infected patients at high risk and reasonably attractive remuneration.

As the contagion spread, the supervising doctors looked for help from their fiercest institutional rivals. Four apothecaries were appointed. Because of their dual skill in diagnosing illnesses and preparing medicines, they could do more than a physician, and Dr. Hodges knew it, though he treated them as assistants rather than full-fledged colleagues. Their bills for physick were double the stipends for the physicians and far in excess of the surgeons’ salaries. The explanation was the high cost of their medicines: whereas a surgeon received £30 and a doctor £100 quarterly from the Guildhall’s coffers, an apothecary could be paid up to £300 for “physick” for the same period.

In August two newly appointed doctors asked for the public’s patience, claiming that the city “is not as devoid of physicians as generally reported.” In reality the system was overwhelmed, and these public physicians required six hours’ notice for appointments from plague sufferers. Boghurst was appalled at the thin coverage by the public medical corps, seeing the poor people in his part of London in dire need. He lamented that two or three young doctors were appointed to “handle 30 or 40 thousand sick people, when two or three hundred was too few.”

Four private doctors took pity on the city’s infected poor and began treating them free of charge at various locations. Dr. Humphrey Brookes covered the area around the eastern wall.

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