The Medical Marketplace • 109country home upstream in Surrey, generously taking the landlord’s children
along for safekeeping. The landlord and his wife died in the city, but Lilly’s
newly extended family all survived, and he continued his medical practice in
his rural neighborhood.
The poorer sort “flockt to him from several parts,” bringing along their
urine for inspection just like rich people. Lilly did well by doing good. He
treated rich and poor alike with his standard Galenic treatments, adding a
cordial and something to sweat the poison out for plague patients. Occasion-
ally, a courtier waiting out the plague in the country pressed a shilling or half
a crown into his hand for advice and for treating the local poor “freely and
without money.” His purse swelled with these windfalls.^29
Lilly walked the blurry line between traditional academic medicine and
magic. In a typical year he took on two thousand clients, including nobles
and gentry ( 124 ), seafarers ( 104 ), female servants ( 254 ), and trades and crafts
persons ( 128 ).^30 Like most astrologers, Lilly was consulted on missing hus-
bands and pregnancy (was she or wasn’t she?) and to determine under what
astrological signs and climatic conditions the conception of a male child and
heir was likeliest. Lilly, Gadbury, and other medical astrologers read stars and
planetary conjunctions to see when the air would become corrupted, and
they told their followers in what season they should be bled, purged, or left
to nature.^31
Belief in witchcraft had just passed its peak a generation before, when it
had been written: “Tis a common practice of some men to go first to a witch,
and then to a Physician.” Skeptics abounded now, yet white witches (mainly
women) and other popular healers who might tap into the supernatural for
their cures were as popular as the astrologers who read the signs of the zo-
diac. The line between magic and religion itself was somewhat indistinct.
Wasn’t the devil driven out of the newborn at baptism? Monarchs laid their
hands on scrofula patients to the sound of an old incantation: “The king
touches thee; God heals thee.” The historian Keith Thomas, in his classic
Religion and the Decline of Magic,tells us moderns: “If magic is to be defined
as the employment of ineffective techniques to allay anxiety when effective
ones are not available, then we must recognize that no society will ever be
free from it.”^32
The white witch was surely busy this plaguetime, even if she was all but
invisible in the written records. Her patients came, as they always had, for a
balm or charm, perhaps a cure for sick cattle, even a corrective for sterility in
a newly married couple. Did she really know “medicine”? And did it matter?
Those who sought her or a male conjurer believed in the magic. Possibly she