Get Rue and Wormwood now into thy house
To drive away the Fleas, the Moth and Louse.
Be sure no Physick take, nor do not bleed
Without the Doctor see an extreame need.
And as abroad thou in the streets doest go,
Bare Rue to keep thy self from stinks also.
—Poor Robin, An Almanack after a
New Fashion( 1665 ), advice for JulyAs the days grew warmer and the infection spread faster and farther, eve-
ryone who couldn’t flee was turning to the medical marketplace. At Saint
Bartholomew’s Hospital just outside the western wall near Smithfield mar-
ket and Aldersgate, crowds routinely gathered around an overturned box
from which a “mountebank” proclaimed his “tested” potions and “guaran-
teed” cures for plague.^1 Throughout the suburbs and city, a wide variety of
popular healers, called cunning men, wise women, white witches, conjurers,
and other appellations, offered an herbal plaster for buboes, a soothing elixir,
and antidotes for the feared pestilential poison.
The medical establishment, consisting of physicians, apothecaries, and
surgeons, called all of these promoters “quacks,” warning the public of dire
consequences from their poisonous potions. The three elite groups thought
of themselves as the only true practitioners of the healing arts and tried to
maintain monopolies on their branches of medicine through their respective
organizations: the College of Physicians, Society of Apothecaries, and Com-
pany of Barber-Surgeons.The Medical Marketplace
[95]5