The Great Plague. The Story of London\'s Most Deadly Year

148 • The Abyss

The Pamphlet Wars Prolonged

Certain scurrilous, lying pamphlets have been vented abroad against me, under

disguised names... to shelter [the Galenists], being Conscious that if they should

come to a chymical Tryal they should be found most Dross.

—George Thomson,Loimotomia, or the Pest Anatomized

That reasoning [is] absurd, which pleads for the Empiricks to be countenanced as

if their experimentings might very much further this pretended Reformation in

Physic.

—Nathaniel Hodges,Vindiciae Medicinae et Medicorum

A boiling cauldron of acidic disputes benefited no one. The neighborhood
apothecary of Saint Giles in the Fields, William Boghurst, was not too busy
with the infected poor to cast a few stones. Many of the doctors, he pro-

claimed, “because of their fearfulness came not to close practice, but stood
shivering at a distance, and profited the less both themselves and their pa-
tients, and commonly lost their lives to boot.”^22 Perhaps Boghurst was un-
aware of Dr. Hodges’ hands-on therapy in the heart of the city or of Dr.

Thomas Wharton, holding fast to his station across the bridge in Saint Tho-
mas Hospital despite an influx of infected sailors from the high seas and sick
soldiers from Hyde Park barracks? But Boghurst’s sights were trained on less
heroic medics, especially those who had fled.^23 The Gresham professor of

physick, Dr. Goddard, had disappeared. So had the “English Hippocrates,”
Dr. Sydenham, along with Reverend Patrick’s personal physician, Dr. Mick-
lethwaite, and his colleague at Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital, Dr. Terne.
After the flight of Saint Bartholomew’s two physicians, the resident apoth-

ecary Francis Bernard remained at his post along with the ill-fated surgeon
Edward Harman and several nurses. The hospital board said little about the
doctors’ absence, although they reprimanded a nurse for inviting a male friend
into the hospital for the night. Had the two been caught together, she might

have been summarily dismissed or paraded around in a cart at noon and
placed in the stocks. As compensation for the absent doctors, the governors
provided Bernard with a furnace for compounding medicines and winked at
his practicing physick. Eventually, they authorized him to treat patients “until

further order therein” (meaning until the two doctors returned).^24
When the plague began, William Johnson, the college’s dispensing chem-
ist, suggested that the doctors and their arch rivals join forces, with the