140 • The Abysshundred persons. In the fifteen years before 1665 , Walbrook had experienced
on average eighteen deaths a year from all causes. Even after plague entered
the parish that summer, fatalities from all causes remained low: three in Au-
gust, eleven in September, five in October, and three again in November.^1 Ye t
the pestilence hemmed in the tiny parish on every side. Saint Mary Wool-
church, where the infection first surfaced inside the city walls, lay just to the
north. “The disease, like the Hydras heads, was no sooner extinguished in
one family, but it broke out in many more,” Hodges observed as the con-
tagion overwhelmed London’s cadre of physicians, apothecaries, and sur-
geons. “In little time we found our task too great, and despaired of putting an
entire stopto the infection.”^2
Dr. Hodges trusted the college’s traditional Galenic way of fighting dis-
eases by adjusting the individual’s “humors” through bleeding, purging,
sweating, and vomiting. He did not always practice strictly by the book, but
he participated heartily in the college’s defense of traditional therapy and of
its own medical monopoly against two ambitious rivals, London’s apothe-
caries and upstart chemical physicians.^3 Both the apothecaries and the
chemical physicians were engaged in a pamphlet war with the college, assert-
ing their own ability to test patients as effectively as any Galenic physician, if
not better. Hodges matched the upstarts’ erudition and invective word for
word, asserting the need for academic training in medicine and trumpeting
the college’s claim to control all medical practice within a seven-mile radius
of the capital.
To ordinary citizens this medical turf warfare must have seemed arcane
and almost irrelevant to their daily struggle to stay healthy. But for Dr.
Hodges and his professional rivals, the stakes were high.^4 Plague raised the
stakes even higher, for it posed the supreme test of the rival medical groups’
competing claims to heal the body of all disease. Their reputation and wealth
as well as the lives of their patients hung in the balance as they battled over
which approach to the plague worked.^5 Haunting memories of the college
doctors’ pitiful performance during previous great plagues added to Hodges’
burden. In 1603 they had fled en masse from the pestilence, prompting the
medical writer Thomas Dekker to compare their ineptitude to that of a pop-
ular stage buffoon of the day, Sir Giles Goosecap.^6 Adding salt to the wound,
James I had rewarded the empirically minded apothecaries for staying on in
1603 ; they were chartered as the Society of Apothecaries, freeing them from
membership in the Company of Grocers.
Unfortunately for Hodges and the rest of the College of Physicians, the
pathology of plague did not fit well with Galenic theory. While this myste-