The Medical Marketplace • 111cious potion for five pounds. A stone’s throw away, a rival stationer offered a
better deal: for only one pound, one could have aurum potabiledistilled from
“a pure christaline and innocent spirit, and known consequently to be the
universal medicine and an antidote against all pestilential and contagious
distempers.”^37
What no one dared say was that every substance ever used as a gold sol-
vent had failed. Allin pressed on in quest of his special plant, asking his
friends Fryth and Jeake in the country to be on the lookout for it. The elusive
spores or seeds must be collected under perfect conditions, he warned. They
were to look for them on sandy soil in the dead of night after a rain accom-
panied by a southwest wind. If they waited until dawn, the precious speci-
mens would be shriveled up and ruined. With all the excitement of a chem-
istry pupil, Allin scribbled a postscript to a letter to Fryth: “I saw this day
someprima materiain the streets.”^38
The competition between rival wonder drugs intensified as the population
in the capital thinned. Those who remained could choose between powdered
unicorn horn, phoenix egg yolk, and an Arab cure-all from stones in camels’
intestines. A popular herbalist from the previous age had touted the medici-
nal benefits of eringo root, or sea holly. It cured yellow jaundice and dropsy;
relieved wind, colic, and pain in the loins; provoked urine; and expelled the
kidney stone.^39 Now it was turning up in Samuel Great’s apothecary shop in
Colchester, whose inhabitants were caught in the epidemic that Ralph Josse-
lin had been dreading in spite of all his faith. Great’s pharmaceutical practice
flourished. He made a special candied eringo from sea holly found on the
nearby coast. The local people were convinced it would protect against the
pestilence and even cure it.
Dr. Hodges thought these exotic cure-alls were hoodwinking the gullible
public, who in desperation tried anything as the plague toll climbed from
2 , 000 to 3 , 900 in just two weeks. The hottest weeks of the summer were still
ahead; the plague was far from peaking. Hodges tested the camel stones for
their alleged effects, increasing the dose tenfold to give them a fair trial. As
he suspected, the stones were a dud, just like the poisonous toad and myth-
ical unicorn!^40 Half a century before, the Great Plague commentator Thomas
Dekker had been equally scornful of quacks and mountebanks “sucking the
sweetness of silver (and now and then of aurum potabile) out of the poison
of blains and carbuncles.”
But behind most doctors of physick loomed the shadow of a white witch.
Remove ourselves from Thomas Sydenham and we find echoes of John Al-
lin’s rhetorical claims, for their medical worlds overlapped in practice and in