142 • The Abyssowned by the absent Dean Sancroft and other substantial citizens. The par-
ish was heavily infected. Peter Barwick, Sancroft’s personal physician and a
member of the College of Physicians along with Nathaniel Hodges, could
see an unending need for food, fumigants, and faith. He used the dean’s re-
lief fund to meet these needs, but Dr. Barwick did not himself attend plague
patients. “Though I have little to do,” he wrote to the dean at his spa in Kent,
“I wishe I had lesse. I thank God I am well and have not come yet that I can
suspect within harmes way.” Four days later he added a revealing detail: “I
hope you will pardon me for writing to you, which I would not have done
but that I have not been in any house that I could as much as suspect of con-
tagion since I saw you.”^8
Dr. Barwick’s belief that the distemper could be passed by contact with an
infected person or place would explain his hesitation to go into infected
houses. He was known to visit places where the danger was almost as great,
however. A committed Christian and the brother of Dean Sancroft’s prede-
cessor, Barwick passed through a throng of worshipers at the cathedral three
times a day to assist the clergy. Possibly this traditionally trained practitioner
was experiencing a loss of faith—not in his religion but in his therapy.
Shut-up households abounded in the alleys behind the cathedral, a dis-
heartening prospect for any physician. Plague had emptied residences next to
Barwick’s home in Angel Court, their inmates having died or fled. “We have
noe neighbours left in ye court besides a goldsmith,” he wrote grimly to San-
croft, “but Mr Fleetham locks up ye avenues every night.” He ticked off the
infected houses around Saint Gregory’s and one of the dean’s rental proper-
ties where two lodgers had been found dead of the plague. Dr. Barwick’s
hand would administer no vomits, sweatings, or blisterings to the cathedral’s
infected poor.
While most of Barwick’s and Hodges’ colleagues did not stay around to
test their rational humoral therapy, the rival group of apothecaries remained
in considerable numbers. By the end of July, plague reached a peak in Saint
Giles in the Fields, with 323 plague fatalities in the week’s official bill plus 47
of “other causes.” Advertisements appeared in L’Estrange’s weekly news-
sheets offering help for a small fee to anyone in the city, suburbs, or country-
side. “William Boghurst, Apothecary at the White Hart hath administered
[drugs] a long time to those infected with the plague, to the number of 40 ,
50 , or so patients a day.” Boghurst trumpeted his medicines as the very best
“with wonderful success by Gods blessing,” including an excellent plague
water, soothing lozenges, and (at only eight pennies an ounce) his special
electuary antidote.^9