The Doctors Stumble• 149apothecaries and surgeons taking orders from the physicians for the duration
of the visitation.^25 The apothecaries responded, disingenuously, that they
never went beyond prescribing medicines “unless in charity or where the
physician refuseth or cannot be called in.” Dr. Hodges fumed that this “spe-
cial service” of the apothecaries was an excuse for poaching on the physi-
cians’ territory.^26
The full fury of both sides descended on the hapless chemist. The apothe-
caries viewed Johnson as a turncoat for supplying the doctors with plague
medicines for the handsome sum of one hundred pounds. And when
Johnson died suddenly, after allegedly attending an autopsy performed by
the chemical physician George Thomson, the college doctors reacted with
deep suspicion.^27
The college’s fellows had already lost ground to the chemical physicians
just before this epidemic, when some of Charles II’s closest advisors voiced
support for incorporating this rival group as a separate medical body. The
king himself became interested in chemical experimentation, setting up his
own laboratory at Whitehall Palace. Now the college’s own chemist had at-
tended a gathering of apothecaries and renegade chemical physicians and
watched them dissect a plague-infected corpse! To Dr. Hodges, anatomy
lessons were rational discourses drawing on essential medical truths handed
down by the “ancients” to the “moderns,” not experimental acts devoid of
theoretical grounding. Examining a plague-ridden cadaver’s innards simply
to see what could be seen was the ultimate medical folly, Hodges declared,
and Thomson the worst kind of “empirick,” verging on quackery.^28
Dr. Thomson, a member of the College of Physicians as well as an exper-
imental chemical physician, was not one to back away from a fight. Indeed,
he may have started this latest round in the ongoing turf war. “Chymical
physitians were no empirics,” he asserted in his pamphlet,Galeno-pale.
Thomson and his group were as grounded in theory as any Galenist, he
argued, and far better at improving it. He claimed the Galenists were hold-
ing back knowledge and worse, killing more humans with their bleedings
and blisterings “and such like butchering tortures” than the sword ever had.
He knew because he had practiced every kind of medicine, beginning with a
Galenist teacher and culminating in collaboration with chemists and sur-
geons. Throwing down the gauntlet, he challenged Hodges to compete in
successfully treating sick persons at a local hospital before impartial judges.
Should Hodges refuse this challenge, Thomson warned, he would expose
him as “a meer sounding piece of vacuity.”^29