Signs and Sources• 63the religious murmured. A divine sign upon the heathen, the judgmental
proclaimed darkly. Sometimes no tokens appeared on a victim until after
death, if at all. Contemporaries who knew this looked for additional “infalli-
ble signs.” An obvious candidate was an extremely high fever. Despite the
range of diseases with fevers, the learned society physician, Dr. Thomas Wil-
lis, had asserted in his work On Feversthat the acute plague fever could be
distinguished from lesser fevers by its intensity. Dr. Thomas Sydenham ex-
pressed the same opinion in a paper published in 1676 , drawing on plague
cases he saw at his Westminster office in 1665 before removing with his
family to the countryside. Sydenham had the advantage over Willis of seeing
both peers and paupers, charging high fees to the wealthy to subsidize his
care of the poor. Finally, there was Dr. Gideon Harvey, an accomplished city
physician who combined practice with theory and a fair measure of common
sense. In A Discourse on the Plague,published while the plague was raging in
1665 , Harvey described the range of signs and symptoms, from an initial
weak pulse to an irregular heartbeat, including raging headaches and frenzy.
These, in conjunction with a high fever, he said, were a strong indication that
the illness was plague. Still, he cautioned that one could not be absolutely
certain the disease was plague “unless the said Feaver prove Infectious, as two
or three dying in one house, or several in a Neighborhood, of one and the
same kind of fever.”^18
Boghurst objected that Harvey and several other physicians who claimed
to write from personal experience had been too afraid of plague to come close
enough to their patients to verify their theories. The suburban apothecary was
undoubtedly frustrated that he had no time to write up his own experiences at
present. Perhaps there was also a twinge of jealousy; Harvey’s university train-
ing and doctor’s license gave him a professional status superior to that of an
apothecary, though this made no difference to their medical methods.^19
Death Counts and Denial
In this year the weekly bill was filling with the death of new borne children and
women in childbed.
—Thomas Rugge,Diurnal( 1665 )Talk of plague made the rounds in London’s cafes and inns. Everyone knew
thatthe sickness, distemper, infection,andcontagionwere code words for plague
and plague alone. From the Royal Exchange to Covent Garden Piazza, cit-