The Great Plague. The Story of London\'s Most Deadly Year

150 • The Abyss

The Anatomy Lesson

I was left destitute of two of my dearest friends in my saddest condition.

—George Thomson,Loimotomia or the Pest Anatomized( 1666 )

For Thomson, the defining trial of this plague epidemic turned out to be his
ill-fated dissection. A patient in Petticoat Lane in the eastern suburb of
Whitechapel had recovered from the plague thanks to Thomson’s cures, but

two of his servants were not so lucky. Against his better judgment the grate-
ful man handed over for dissection the body of his fifteen-year-old servant.
Thomson’s plague dissection was far from the first exploration inside a
plague victim’s body, though such dissections were not common. During the

Black Death, a Perugian professor had dared to open up the body of a plague
cadaver. Finding a poisonous boil near the vicinity of the heart, he concluded
that from this boil the plague venom passed throughout the body. Later au-
topsies suggested the stomach or spleen as the seat of the infection.^30

As Thomson opened the body and placed his hand into the still-warm ab-
dominal cavity, he was startled to discover an unnatural color and pitchlike
fluid within the spleen. This had to be the seat of the infection. Then he en-
countered black juice in the stomach, which he associated with the body’s

defense mechanism—its “archeus.” The dark liquid, he said, “shows the lu-
minous spirit or archeus is deprived of light. The shadow of death must
needs follow.”^31
This talk of an archeus was part of Helmontian orthodoxy. At the turn of

the seventeenth century, the Flemish nobleman-physician and devout Chris-
tian Johannes Baptista van Helmont had combined medical, chemical, and
moral theories in a synthesis that greatly influenced England’s budding
chemical physicians. Among his major tenets was belief in a chemical and

spiritual governor and sentinel of the healthy body, which he had called the
archeus.He also theorized that this archeus could be overwhelmed by seeds
of disease entering the body.^32
Unable to explain everything that he saw during his plague autopsy,

Thomson, by resorting to the body’s failing “archeus,” had taken as great a
leap of faith as had the Galenists, with their notion of an internal putrefac-
tion of the body’s “humors.” On a personal level, he feared that his own ar-
cheus was failing him after he had cut his hand during the dissection. Could

this protector have been caught off guard and let in the infection from the
cadaver?