Prologue
[1]They were all there at the beginning. In the heart of old London,Dr. Nathaniel Hodges was busily treating his patients with medical therapies
that dated back to ancient times. A short walk away, at the Golden Fleece in
the shadow of Saint Paul’s cathedral, Sir William Turner tended to his stock
of fine imported silks when he wasn’t called to the Guildhall along with his
fellow aldermen to discuss city policy with the lord mayor. An ambitious
young member of the Royal Navy Board, Samuel Pepys, could be seen al-
most any day hailing a coach in the city and dashing through a gate in the
ancient wall to the royal palace of Whitehall in the best part of suburban
Westminster. Nearby were the newly developed Piazza of Covent Garden
and its church, whose new minister, the Reverend Symon Patrick, preached
to some of the most socially prominent and wealthy residents of the metrop-
olis. In a much poorer part of the suburbs, in the parish of Saint Giles in the
Fields, the apothecary William Boghurst offered his powders, pills, and a
regimen of medical therapies in his office at the White Hart, which doubled
as the Boghurst family’s home.^1
These five men were concerned for the welfare of their metropolis, with its
half-million permanent citizens, seasonal residents, and visitors—close to
one-tenth of the English population. Their world did not end at the outside
borders of Greater London’s one hundred thirty parishes, however, for the
fortunes of King Charles II’s capital were linked inexorably with the other
nine-tenths of the country’s population. Perishable fruit and fresh vegetables
arrived from nearby villages, and grain for baking bread and brewing ale
came from twenty or thirty miles away in the Home Counties that sur-
rounded the capital. Drovers from the Midlands herded cattle, sheep, and
pigs to the capital for fattening and slaughtering, and some livestock arrived