Signs and Sources• 61from 12 , 000 that year to 4 , 000 in 1647. During the next three years, the
number of plague deaths dropped sharply, to 693 , 71 , and 15. After that, plague
lurked in a few of the suburbs year after year, with an average of 9 fatalities in
each of the three years before 1665.^8 Boghurst knew the specific localities: the
disease, he declared, was “endemicall” in his Middlesex outparish of Saint
Giles in the Fields and in three adjacent parishes in Westminster: Saint
Clement Danes, Saint Martin in the Fields, and Saint Paul Covent Garden
(see map 4 ).
The isolated deaths in Westminster’s pestered alleys drew little attention
at Whitehall Palace or inside the protective walls of noble estates on the
Strand. But plague was an ever-present concern for medical professionals
who practiced in the four endemic plague areas and a worry to practitioners
in places now free of the pestilence but prime candidates for its return (be-
cause of their dangerous combination of poverty, overcrowded dwellings, and
high incidence of other disease). In the extreme north of the suburbs, in the
densely pestered parish of Saint James Clerkenwell, the French doctor The-
ophilus Garencières kept his eyes open for plague on his patients, having
known its terrible toll in northern France in the 1630 s while training to be a
physician at Caen.^9 And because the infection kept entering a few poor
dwellings in Saint Giles in the Fields, the native English apothecary Wil-
liam Boghurst kept abreast of medical understanding of the disease by read-
ing everything that was available in English and European sources.
Boghurst could quote Thucydides on the Plague of Athens and speak with
authority on Justinian’s Plague. A treasured copy of Dr. Thomas Willis’s
pathbreaking work on the range of fevers, published in 1659 , shared space in
his library with weighty Latin tomes and shorter English tracts on plague.
Some of these works dated to the Black Death; others had appeared during
recent plague visitations. Laypersons and even some professional caregivers
could not easily tell what was new and what was recycled information.^10 But
Boghurst’s experience with plague patients helped him pick out anything
that broke new ground. The best research was done by medical specialists in
Europe: the German Jesuit polymath Kircher, who had trained his low-pow-
ered microscope on human blood; the Flemish nobleman van Helmont, a
leader among the avant-garde “chymical physitians” who were challenging
the methods of the Galenist old guard of medicine; and the influential
Dutchman Diemerbroeck, whose Tractatus de Pestewas now being translated
into English. Boghurst had all their books at hand.^11
When the pestilential distemper reappeared in Saint Giles in the Fields in
April and fanned out in May, Boghurst knew the disease had advanced from