266 • The Great Plagueapothecaries kept their “diagnosticks” and “treatments” for the dreaded dis-
ease. A new outbreak of plague in Europe, they knew, would bring panic
again to England’s shores.
William Boghurst left his firsthand account of the Great Plague in manu-
script form, while publishing a poem on the “Antiquities and Excellencyes of
London.” Boghurst died in obscurity at fifty-four in September 1685 , twenty
years to the month after the plague of 1665 had peaked. “He was an honest,
just man,” it was written, “skillful in his profession, and in the Greek and La-
tin Tongue, delighting in the study of Antiquity; and plaid exceeding well
upon the lute.” He had worked hard to provide comfortably for his survivors,
“a sorrowful widow and six children.” At the country churchyard where he
was buried, a worn tombstone retains the following spare Latin verse: “Here
lies the bodies of Anne, James, William and Henry Boghurst of singular
piety and conspicuous honesty.”^3 Boghurst’s plague study finally reached the
public two centuries later, when plague raged again in faraway, British-held
Hong Kong.
Nathaniel Hodges, a year younger than Boghurst, outlived him by three
years. His dangerous work in 1665 with the city’s public health committee
had been duly acknowledged and well, though belatedly, rewarded. He
gained notoriety by defending Galenist orthodoxy against the chemical phy-
sician George Thomson, who had conducted the controversial plague au-
topsy. His account of the Great Plague,Loimologia,appeared in Latin in
1672 , to the acclaim of the College of Physicians. An English translation for
the general reading public was published posthumously as plague raged in
Marseilles in 1720. At the height of his career, Hodges was given the honor
of delivering the annual oration named for England’s greatest medical dis-
coverer of the century, William Harvey.
From this lofty position Hodges sank to an ignoble end. His medical prac-
tice fell off, perhaps because of the alcoholism that had been apparent during
those death-defying rounds of 1665. He died a debtor in Ludgate jail. A
plaque was placed in his parish’s Wren-restored church of Saint Stephen
Walbrook. “Here lies in his grave Nathaniel Hodges, Doctor of Medicine,” it
reads simply, “who while a child of Earth lived in hope of Heaven. He was
formerly of Oxford, and survives by his writings on the plague.”^4
Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn enjoyed a more enduring public fortune.
Their goal of a large naval hospital at Greenwich eventually came to fruition.
Evelyn continued to publish erudite works on gardening and other exotic
subjects, while Pepys headed the administration of the Royal Navy from 1683
to 1689. This adept moneymaker realized a small fortune. In the first five