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

152 • The Abyss

What really happened? The educated public was left to speculate from ex-
isting knowledge about plague and the few irrefutable facts of the case. On

the one hand, even if the deceased persons had been at the autopsy, they
might have been infected before it. On the other hand, the stench from the
cadaver could have conveyed the poison to their bodies, causing their demise
within twenty-four to forty-eight hours.

An impartial person might have judged Thomson’s autopsy a success of
sorts. He had come across a “glandulous substance like a lamb’s stone” in the
right ventricle of the heart. Drawing on William Harvey’s discovery of the
circulation of blood, he offered an ingenious explanation of the plague vic-

tim’s pathology. The obstruction in the heart, Thomson reasoned, prevented
the archeus from circulating the blood properly and thus ridding the body of
the disease. What an intriguing combination of medical theories this was,

mixing Harveian circulation and the spiritual life force that the English
chemical physician had adapted from the empirical continental experimenter
van Helmont and his precursor, Paracelsus.^36
Thomson’s defense of his controversial dissection, written after the epi-
demic passed and included in his Loimotomiaof 1666 , failed to silence his

critics. Nevertheless, it gave him a printed forum for laying out in exacting
detail his observations and explanations of how this deadly disease affected
the human organs.^37 Going further into the physiological responses of the
body to plague invasion would require progress on many medical and scien-

tific fronts. At the Royal Society, an eclectic group of scientific investigators
was making some halting steps in that direction.

The Virtuosi

I reckon the investigation and divulging of useful truths in Physick... among the

greatest and most extensive acts of charity.

—Robert Boyle,The Usefulness of Natural Philosophy( 1663 )

The fledgling Royal Society, chartered by Charles II three years before this

Great Plague, claimed the entire physical and biological world as its lab-
oratory. Its working members (called virtuosibecause they experimented in a
wide range of subjects) were much more open than were members of most
institutional groups of the day. Interested laypersons like Samuel Pepys (the

“curiosi”) eagerly attended their public demonstrations. The virtuosi’s inspi-