The Doctors Stumble• 151Thomson said he stopped to wash his hand and hold it over a dish of
burning brimstone. But he worried that he might not have acted in time to
aid the defending archeus in checkmating the powerful poison. On an earlier
occasion, when he had cut himself while dissecting a spotted fever cadaver,
he had saved himself with his patented Buffo frog treatment and strong liq-
uors, culminating in draining by applying leeches. This time, being alone in
his patient’s house except for a surviving servant, he rushed across town to
consult two of his physician friends. The first one, Dr. Dey, was of no help,
since he was suffering a relapse of the plague he had thought he was rid of.
As night set in Thomson called on his closest associate in the pamphlet wars,
Dr. Starkey. But this friend was more in need of a cure than himself, with the
fatal signs being visible on his body. Starkey, the best plague doctor of all, in
Thomson’s opinion, had made the mistake of trying to bring down the
plague’s fever with cold beer (in line with the Galenist notion of curing a
condition with its opposite quality). This inexplicable deviation from the
sound chemical cure of applying a hot antidote to a feverish condition,
Thomson said, had cost Starkey his life.^33
Some other medically informed individuals in London had a different
opinion about what had taken place on that fateful day, based on the suspi-
cion that Thomson had not been alone during the autopsy. John Tillison got
wind of the rumors at the cathedral and breathlessly passed on his version to
Dean Sancroft: Drs. Burnet, Glover, and O’Dowde, along with one or two
fellows of the College of Physicians, the chemist Johnson, and some sur-
geons and apothecaries had all died suddenly. What a grim harvest of dispa-
rate souls. Burnet was Pepys’ personal physician, Glover one of the doctors
treating the sick poor for the city, O’Dowde a prominent chemical physician,
and Johnson the chemist of the Galenist College. The cathedral canon ven-
tured an explanation that the corpse had been full of tokens and “being in
hand with ye dissected body some fell downe dead immediately and others
did not outlive ye next day at noon.”^34
Across London Bridge, the religious dissenter and unlicensed doctor John
Allin declared the death of these men sheer folly. These medical visionaries
had insulted the Galenists and tempted God with their overweening pride.
Confident that their chemical cures would conquer plague, they had seen the
sickness as a disease more than as a divine judgment. From what Allin heard,
they had bought the most infected corpse they could lay their hands on for
dissecting. “Upon ye opening whereof, a stench ascended from the body and
infected them every one, and its said they all are dead since, the most dis-
tractedly madd.”^35