Signs and Sources• 59At the Guildhall, the mayor and aldermen had been on alert since the sin-
gle plague fatality in Saint Mary Woolchurch. Four weeks passed without
any parish clerk inside the wall acknowledging another plague death. But
during the second week of June, four city residents succumbed. Two died in
a cluster of shacks near London Bridge, a third near Cripplegate exit at the
northern wall, and the fourth in a fashionable parish near the navy offices
just inside the eastern wall. This last fatality and the spread of the disease to
the nearby house of a physician, infecting one of his servants, struck fear
among the professional people of the quarter. The doctor was Alexander
Burnet, a member of the prestigious College of Physicians, whose patients
included Samuel and Elizabeth Pepys. Dr. Burnet had sent his sick servant
to the city pesthouse north of the wall, a customary medical practice. But he
had defied middle-class custom by inviting the authorities to shut up the rest
of his household, including himself, for the statutory forty-day quarantine of
infected buildings. How many professional persons, including his fellow
physicians, would have protected their neighbors this way at the risk of their
own lives and livelihood? Samuel Pepys stared at the cross on the door and
wondered how the sickness had entered such a substantial household. The
Burnet residence was one of the finest in the city, boasting nine hearths.^4
The city physician Dr. Hodges warned that the pestilential disease could
strike anyone, regardless of age, sex, or social condition. The suburban apo-
thecary Boghurst estimated that half of those who caught the infection
would succumb. Some physicians put the figure much higher. A few doctors
said it could strike like apoplexy, as had happened during the Black Death.
But even Boghurst’s more measured observations could not have calmed his
patients’ families and neighbors. The venom spread through the vital organs
rapidly, he acknowledged, but “I saw none dye under twenty to twenty four
hours.”^5 The rising toll from the plague’s first appearance inside the wall to
its return five weeks later told a tale of approaching disaster (table 3 ).^6
Signs and Symptoms
Of the Tokens... I have ranked them in the forefront of the evil Signs, making
them the fore-horses of Death’s Chariot, because among all the evill signes there
are none so common or conspicuous, soe dispatching, certain and infallible signes
of death as this.
—William Boghurst,Loimographia ...a personal account of
the Great Plague from November 1664 to May 1666