192 • The Abyssfrom the two original facilities were far too low to be credible. For the entire
year, the bills listed 156 plague deaths at the city pesthouses in Cripplegate,
plus 3 from other causes. Curiously, the Tothill facility also reported 156
plague deaths. Undoubtedly, many in these cramped quarters expired with-
out a statistical trace, while a few fortunate individuals survived their stay.
What help were they given from the physician or surgeon in charge? How
did expectant mothers go through the ordeals of childbirth? Records show
that seven midwives went to deliver babies on six different occasions in
Westminster’s pesthouse, and a priest was listed as baptizing them. What
courage these caregiving and religious acts demonstrated.
Although no account of life and death inside one of these pesthouses has
yet been discovered, the churchwardens of Saint Margaret parish offer some
clues in their weekly list of the inmates of Tothill Fields. A comparison of
these counts with the same weeks’ death counts reported in the Bills of Mor-
tality yields an implausibly high survival rate that, at the peak of the epi-
demic, was far above the usual ratio of 10 – 40 percent for this disease. Such a
deviation from the norm in a cramped facility where death was more likely
than in many infected households defies all reason. The greatest likelihood
was a breakdown in running the facility and counting the dying and dead.
When the occupancy of Saint Margaret’s sheds jumped from four to fif-
teen in June, only four burials were recorded in the parish register for that
month. In July the occupants doubled to thirty; again only four burials were
recorded for each of the next two weeks. Then, as deaths in Saint Margaret’s
parish shot up from 200 to 350 , with all but 12 listed as plague fatalities in the
Bill of Mortality, the death count at the pesthouse was only 7. Yet the
churchwardens counted 80 inmates that same week in this facility, making
the survival rate a totally implausible 91 percent. Nor could the 39 pesthouse
dwellers the churchwarden listed during the first week of August have been
the same as the 39 persons reported buried there in the weekly bill, since 7 on
the churchwardens’ list were still there the next week!
Undoubtedly, the pesthouse keeper and his small medical staff were so
overcome with caring for the sick that they lost track of who came in, who
died, and who was discharged after recovering. Their confusion, however,
was compounded by the habit of Saint Margaret’s bearers of dropping some
of their dead at the pesthouse pit instead of the churchyard. That would ex-
plain how the burial count for the first week of August reached thirty-nine
despite the survival of seven inmates into the following week. A different
tragedy awaited the people called Quakers, who kept excellent records of
their fallen members.