Profiting from death

for most of the time. However, both Pepys and Allin noted the premature return of the absentees, who ironically “mett with what they fled from”: “divers fresh houses, since the return of fresh persons hither, visited [infected by the plague]”.

Londoners anxiously awaited, digested and discussed the weekly Bill of Mortality, charting the rise and eventual decline of the epidemic. Pepys comments frequently on the weekly totals: “in great trouble to see the bill this week rise so high” (10 August); “8,252 dead in all, and of them, 6,878 of the plague – which is a most dreadfull Number” (7 September); “Great joy we have in the weekly bill, it being come to 544 in all, and but 333 of the plague” (30 November).

Allin and Patrick quoted the weekly total in their letters to country correspondents, often adding information on local numbers. Rumour abounded, and stories circulated of multiple deaths – “many whole familyes of 7, 8, 9, 10, 18 in a family totally swept away” – and sudden sickness – a minister “preached Sunday sennight [a week] before, but was dead with his wife and three children by Thursday night”. Correspondents asked anxiously about friends and colleagues, and for confirmation of reports of death or survival.

The Bills of Mortality were an official publication, but there was evidently demand for a range of cheap commercial publications, too, and a marketing opportunity for remedies and medicaments. Commemorative or composite ‘bills’, brought out by a number of independent printers during the epidemic, combined text, images and statistics, reminding Londoners of other historic or more recent plagues, proffering remedies or prayers, even providing them with blanks to fill in the weekly death totals.

Ministers published sermons and “consolatory discourses” for their flocks. Doctors of all kinds published broadsides and pamphlets, interspersing advice, recipes and advertisements for proprietary waters, tinctures, ointments and fumes. The popularity of such tracts indicates a demand for information, but no consistency of approach: Londoners embraced a variety of medical theories, from traditional Galenism (the system of medicine that included the theory of the four humours) to more modern ‘Chymicall’ approaches, and even astrological medicine (in which celestial bodies were thought to rule over the human body). John Allin, who practised medicine as well as acting as a minister, keenly pursued a substance made from algae that he believed to have healing properties, but also noted the popularity of amulets “made of the poison of the toad”. Symon Patrick was directed by his physician Dr Micklethwaite to mix and drink “London treacle and lady Allen’s water”; however, “I bought both presently, but forgat still to mix them: only now and then I take a little treacle”. ‘London treacle’ was a compound of multiple substances, obtainable from apothecaries rather than made at home. It seems to have been a popular preventative or remedy against plague, recurring in numerous publications, along with many different ‘plague waters’ or distillations. Careful diet was another common prescription, with one physician advising abstention from “the boiled herbs of colliflowers, cabbage, coleworts, spinage, and beets”. Another recommended readers

“overfill not your bodies with meate which is hard of disgesture, for it breeds ill humors”.

For all the remedies that Londoners ingested, and foods they avoided, the impact of the plague on their city was immense. London’s parish registers tell hundreds of short stories of the epidemic, recording the successive deaths of members of the same family, and the decimation of local communities. Symon Patrick and John Allin each listed the deaths of clerical colleagues; Allin also recorded that “above seven score drs, apothecarys, and surgeons are dead of this distemper in and about ye City since this visitation”. Richard Smyth listed more than a hundred individuals whom he knew, or knew of, who died in the epidemic.

For many of those who survived, the huge mortality formed an occasion for reflection and consideration, with even Samuel Pepys admitting that “we have gone through great melancholy because of the great plague”. But although mortality dwindled during the following months, and business and social life began to recover, Londoners had yet to face another cataclysm, less deadly but perhaps even more disruptive: the fire that broke out on 2 September 1666.

Vanessa Harding is professor of London history at Birkbeck, University of London. She will be discussing the Great Plague of 1665 on our podcast: