96 • ConfusionSomewhere between the popular and elite healers, another group of care-
givers were carrying on a brisk business, as they always did. Medical astrol-
ogers used the stars and seasons to advise clients on everything from when to
be bled to when to conceive. Their almanacs included prognostics on pesti-
lential epidemics, complete with recipes for plague preservatives and cures.
Closely allied to them were alchemists and other unlicensed devotés of ap-
proaches to medicine frowned on by orthodox physicians. John Allin secretly
practiced medicine in Southwark, hoping for a breakthrough in curing all
disease with his combined knowledge of alchemy and astrology.
The Great Plague had brought forth a quiver full of antidotal arrows, but
who among the many self-proclaimed experts on plague should be listened
to? The invasion of the sickness was a golden opportunity for swapping or
stealing one another’s notions and potions, all packaged in attractive medical
jargon. In the most healthy of times, it was said that there was “scarce a piss-
ing-place about the city” that didn’t have posters advertising the services of a
medical quack, so what must the situation have been in a time of plague? In-
side the wall, attractive books were displayed in the bookstalls at Amen
corner near Saint Paul’s, fresh from the print shops around Saint Bartholo-
mew’s. Some medical tracts, recently translated, had found their way from
Holland, Germany, and France. Each week’s editions of the NewesandIntel-
ligencercarried ads for promising potions. For the illiterate carter, a cheaply
printed sheet of advice to the poor “in time of plague,” read aloud by a pass-
erby for a penny or two, offered some hope.
Any potential treatment was embraced as the death toll rose. One week it
was 2 , 000 dead; the next week brought 3 , 000 to their graves. Gone were the
low death reports of the previous year, which during the same two weeks to-
taled 402 and 348. In the delightful book titled Quacks,the medical historian
Roy Porter makes a guarded suggestion that many sellers of popular med-
icine “were less cheats than zealots: if we speak of delusion it is primarily
self-delusion.” His colleague, Bill Bynum, when asked “what was a quack?”
replied: “Quack is what Quack does.”^2 When a tempting preservative or cure
didn’t prove effective, many Londoners tried something else (and something
else and something else) until the hoped-for relief was found—no recrimina-
tions. In the culture of Protestant England, there was also a right—even a
duty—to self-help.
In May, when it looked like the disease might become a major “visitation,”
an emergency public health subcommittee of the king’s council called on the
most elite body of London medicine, the College of Physicians, “to put a
stop to that evil as far as [they] could by some remedies.” Several of the col-