144 • The Abysscapital, perhaps between 250 and 300 doctors, apothecaries, and surgeons re-
mained out of a normal cohort of some 500 to 600 licensed and unlicensed
practitioners claiming professional skills.^11
Watching the plague’s toll on practitioners soar in early September, the
unlicensed doctor John Allin passed on the grim news: “I heare also yt above
7 score Drs, Apothecaryes and Surgeons are dead of this distem[per] in &
about the city.” A few weeks later, Samuel Pepys was shocked by the ongoing
toll among medical practitioners in Westminster who had refused to join the
exodus of their courtier clients back in July. Now it was all suffering and si-
lence: “They tell me that in Westminster there is never a physitian, and but
one apothecary left, all being dead.”^12 John Allin’s estimate of 140 fatalities
when the epidemic was at its peak suggests that 50 percent of those who
stayed may have fallen in private or public practice— 25 percent of the total
cohort of licensed and unlicensed practitioners serving London in normal
times.
Despite this appalling mortality some parishes kept finding a doctor,
apothecary, or surgeon to treat their infected poor. The need for these care-
givers was especially great in the suburbs, which had no central guildhall to
coordinate medical services. There were also public medical servants at Saint
Thomas Hospital in Southwark and Saint Bartholomew’s outside the west-
ern wall, the old pesthouses of London and Westminster, and the three addi-
tional facilities in the suburbs.
In mid-June, when it was clear that the epidemic could not be contained,
the mayor finally asked the College of Physicians to recommend six or more
doctors who would be willing to serve London’s poor. Of eight college doc-
tors who volunteered, the mayor and aldermen chose only two, Nathaniel
Hodges to serve inside the walls and Thomas Witherley, a resident of Saint
Andrew Holborn parish, to care for the sick poor in the western liberties of
the city. They joined an emergency health committee headed by Sir William
Turner, another alderman, and two sheriffs.
The city fathers were dragging their feet and pinching pennies. Money
was tight and the city’s treasury was perilously low after the unusual winter
expenses. The mayor and aldermen were holding on to their emergency
funds for more pressing needs, such as buying fresh burial grounds and pre-
paring for mass graves. The two doctors were to be paid handsomely, how-
ever, though without a “life stipend” and survivorship to their widows if they
fell in the line of duty—provisions that the college had earnestly requested.^13
Should Hodges and Witherley survive to September, each was promised a
stipend of one hundred pounds “for the prevention and cure of the plague