The Medical Marketplace • 101The line between all these “professional” caregivers and the rest of the
medical marketplace, always blurry, virtually disappeared in the face of the
mysterious plague, which treated Galenist theory and bogus cures with equal
indifference. Quacks, according to Dr. Hodges (who was staying on), “thrust
into every hand some trash or other under the disguise of a pompous title.”^6
Yet who was the “legitimate” practitioner and who the quack, when the an-
swer depended on effectiveness rather than the origin of the therapy? Dr.
Willis, a paragon of medical professionalism and friend of Reverend Patrick,
had his own “when all else fails” cures for standard ailments. To treat jaun-
dice the doctor combined fresh urine with ashes from the ash tree and re-
duced the mixture by heating to a paste. As it dried and hardened, the pa-
tient’s jaundice vanished. Willis related that this cure was known by the
“vulgar sort,” which can be translated to mean that he looked to popular
medicine when his learned remedies didn’t work.^7
Dr. Cocke touted himself as the doctor of the poor. Fair enough. Most of
his plague manuals and emergency recipes were priced just right for them.
Many well-worn herbal recipes prescribed by doctors like Cocke, however,
probably originated with a white witch lacking the university education he
considered necessary for the practice of medicine.^8 A white witch was known
to try honest, “good” cures and had quite a closet full of medicaments, usually
herbal, the result of trial, error, and folk tradition. These cures worked their
way up the social ladder via the household maid of a noble lady in the country,
for example, and then passed on through a male relative in the city to his uni-
versity-trained physician. Perhaps the countess of Huntingdon’s healing acu-
men, well known among her Leicestershire neighbors and her relatives in
London, originated in these upward-bound remedies. Out in Essex, Lady
Mary Luckyn had much the same reputation as a conduit of medical wisdom.^9
Medical knowledge could work its way in the other direction, too. Alma-
nacs and books of herbals were accessible to the literate and through them to
others who could not read. Home remedies were jotted down in a family
“receipt” or “recipe” book containing information about cooking, health, and
run-of-the-mill cures for distempers. People treated family members when
illness came their way. Friends swapped recipes. For remedies, someone
could just as easily go to the garden as to Galen.^10