by Richard Sugg
If you could not leave, nominal remedies were certainly plentiful. For the rich, there was unicorn’s horn, taken as powder (an entire horn, owned by Queen Elizabeth, was supposed to be worth £10,000). If you were poorer you could make a plaster from onion, butter, mallows and garlic, and lay it warm against a sore. Onions were especially popular because they were absorbent, and so would soak up poisonous vapours. Garlic, meanwhile, was powerful in this and many other ways (partly because of its potent smell). Long before it became standard protection against vampires, it was widely held to cancel the force of a magnet (and thus to interfere with mariners’ compasses).
In chapter two we heard Christopher Irvine stating that ‘the arse of a hen plucked bare, and applied to the biting of a viper, freeth the body from venom’.28 This last cure echoes plague therapies going back at least some decades. Plucking feathers from a live chicken, you held the bare part to your plague sore until the bird died. You then used another live bird (and possibly a third) until you reached one which survived. This bird’s deliverance indicated that the plague spirits had been fully drawn out of you.29 Some time around 1612 Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi gets his point across forcefully by assuring an old lady: ‘I would sooner eat a dead pigeon taken from the soles of the feet of one sick of the plague, than kiss one of you fasting’.30 With Irvine asserting various uses of spiritual transfer in 1656, we can imagine that such cures would have been frequently attempted in the notorious plagues of 1665 and ‘66. Yet even before this, the sheer range of therapies aimed to cure or prevent plague strongly suggests that, for some, there was nothing which was not worth trying 31.
So, along with numerous roots, flowers, seeds or spices, you might take ‘the flesh of vipers, mummy … quails, thrushes, hart’s-horn, unicorn’s-horn, bezoar … ivory … emerald, ruby, carbuncle, pearls, coral’, or gold or silver. For pains of the belly incited by plague, you could apply a plaster which included frankincense, dragon’s blood, mummy, and nutmeg oil.32 Clearly, these various gems, and unicorn’s horn, would have been very much more expensive than mummy. There again, if you were rich and believed in the unicorn, then your sense of wonder very probably extended to the curative potency of the human body. And finally, given that all ultimately rested in the hands of God, why not try whatever came to hand, and hope that the Almighty would assist the cure? If God left a physician such as Edward Bolnest in London in 1665, after most doctors had fled, he surely meant you to take advantage of the corpse medicines which this brave altruist could supply.33
The Sweating Sickness
It is hard now to really imagine the social chaos and trauma of severe plague outbreaks. Perhaps the best modern fictional resemblance occurs in Danny Boyle’s 2002 film 28 Days Later, with its bleak apocalyptic scenarios and violent social disintegration. But the plague at least gave many people some bare chance of preparing remedies, or of simply composing themselves for a good pious death. In 1485, just before the coronation of Henry VII, England was hit by an entirely unfamiliar disease whose combined ferocity and speed of attack are comparable to a widespread epidemic of SARS or Ebola. Its horrors still seem fresh decades later, as recalled in 1552 by the physician John Caius. Where the plague might take between four and fourteen days to decisively claim its victims, the sweating sickness
immediately killed some in opening their windows, some in playing with children in their street doors, some in one hour, many in two it destroyed, and at the longest, to them that merrily dined, it gave a sorrowful supper. As it found them so it took them … and in one house sometime three sometime five … sometime more sometime all, of the which, if the half in every town escaped, it was thought great favour.34
Unlike syphilis, ‘Sudor Anglicus’, or ‘the English Sweat’, was acknowledged as a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon affliction. First recorded in Shrewsbury in mid-April 1485, the sweating sickness spread through Chester, Coventry and Oxford, and reached London by 7 July, moving east and north in August and September. As Roy Porter notes, the English sweat returned in 1507, 1528, 1551, and 1578. According to the physician Thomas Cogan, during that penultimate recurrence of mid-century ‘there died … within six days space … eight hundred persons, and most of them men in their best years’.35 And this, incidentally, was merely in London and its immediate neighbourhood.36
The Hand of Death
To plague and the English Sweat we must add tuberculosis, smallpox, and the all too frequent cot or infant deaths which have come down to us in the bare outlines of baptismal and burial records. For centuries smallpox hit rich and poor, young and old, with either fatal or permanently disfiguring results. As we have seen, Elizabeth I was scarred after contracting the disease in 1562, while in September 1660 smallpox claimed the life of Charles II’s youngest brother, Henry, and his sister Mary.37 It has been claimed that by the Restoration the disease ‘had overtaken the Plague, leprosy and syphilis’ as the greatest killer within Europe.38 Right up until Edward Jenner introduced vaccination in 1798, medicine remained largely powerless against this durable scourge. There were especially severe outbreaks in 1641, 1695, 1718–19, 1733–39, 1749, and 1764–65. When Europeans took this disease to the New World, the biologically defenceless native inhabitants were mowed down in staggering numbers. The Huron, for example, lost ‘one half to two-thirds of their population’ to smallpox and other diseases in just six years. By the 1760s, the devastating power of smallpox in the New World was so well recognised that the British commander-in-chief of North America, Sir Geoffrey Amherst, deliberately gave infected blankets to rebellious Canadian tribes as a tactic of early germ warfare.39
If we had only data on plague and sweating sickness, we would still retain a powerful impression of Renaissance disease and mortality. The first excelled in its sheer persistence and the bewildering scale of casualties. Although population estimates for this period are notoriously uncertain, the London plague toll of 1625, exceeding 35,000, could have been as much as a fifth of the capital’s population.40 Scaling this up to population levels of 2011, we find that perhaps as many as one and a half million would have perished. In general terms, such statistics were not that great an anomaly. The historians E.A. Wrigley and Roger Schofield estimate that of the twenty-three worst years for overall mortality between 1541 and 1871, eighteen occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.41
If plague had the upper hand statistically, the sweating sickness took the prize for sheer speed of attack. One moment you were alive, seething with all the vitality, hope and possibility you or I feel now. The next you were hurtling breathlessly into the depths of an undecided eternity. As Donne put it from his sickbed of 1623: ‘variable, and therefore miserable condition of man; this minute I was well, and am ill, this minute. I am surprised with a sudden change, and alteration to worse, and can impute it to no cause, nor call it by any name’.42
Ultimately, Donne survived not only his relapsing fever of 1623, but several plagues, including the epic outbreak just a few months later, in 1625. Yet Donne and his family were equally familiar with sudden deaths in the earlier years of James I. Between early 1603 and August 1617, Donne’s wife, Ann, had twelve children. Two were stillborn; two died before age five; one before age ten, and one before the age of twenty. When she herself finally perished in August 1617, five days after the especially difficult birth of a stillborn child, Ann was less than thirty-five years old.43 When Donne himself told his audience, in a sermon preached at Lincoln’s Inn, that ‘thy flesh is but dust held together by plasters … dissolution and putrefaction is gone over thee alive’, he captured the essentially porous division between life and death with grim accuracy.44
For most people in this era, death really did stalk unchecked through the midst of human life. Recalling the popular image of the hand of death, laid in skeletal chill on an unwary shoulder, we might rather imagine that for the Renaissance life was lived perpetually within the half-closed fist of death. It was just a question of when it might suddenly snap to, a matter of sensing its p
utrid muscles as they tightened over the frail shell of the defenceless human body. From any mournful pulpit or any creaking gibbet, from the busy gallows of Tyburn to the spiked heads and quarters of London Bridge and the city gates, death stared you hard in the face, calm and unblinking. And the response of many was probably to stare back with similar composure. Take, for example, the Swiss visitor Thomas Platter, who in 1599 saw ‘more than thirty skulls of noble men … executed and beheaded for treason’, stuck on pikes at the south side of London Bridge. With some surprise Platter further notes that the descendants of these traitors would often eagerly point out a family skull (perhaps incorrectly?), taking pride in the fact that ‘their antecedents were of such high descent that they could even covet the crown’.45 In August 1661 the Dutch visitor William Schellinks saw on the bridge ‘all the heads on stakes, nineteen or twenty in number, amongst them the head of Hugh Peters the preacher’, who had suffered hanging, drawing and quartering the year before in revenge for the execution of Charles I. The following day, passing out of the city at Moorgate, Schellinks was greeted by ‘many limbs of traitors or accomplices of Oliver Cromwell … displayed on stakes’.46
We can never be absolutely sure just how this kind of environment affected the contemporaries of Marlowe or Rochester. But we can confidently say that the average privileged European is now far more terrified of dying than were Donne, Cromwell or Milton. Fervent belief in the possibility of salvation dominated the minds and hearts of these three men and of all their millions of fellow Christians. Any schoolboy could tell you the cause of the plague: it was God’s anger. And any schoolboy could use the most popular and democratic remedy of the age for this and all other diseases. You would, simply, kneel down and pray – sometimes alone, sometimes collectively. In the sixteenth century and after, plague and other sudden calamities typically prompted national fasts and prayer days.47 In the late seventeenth century the clergyman Richard Allestree (d.1681) estimated over 4,000 deaths in one week in 1624, and over 7,000 in a week in 1665. For all that, he readily insisted of God, ‘it was his tender mercy, that he spared any alive’, for He ‘wounds, that he may heal; and in wounding, heals us; for his compassions fails not to us sinners’.48
We must accept that most people in this era did not die in the way that agnostics or atheists do now. (And we might add that there are very few Christian martyrs in our own time.) And yet there must, for all that, have remained certain basic instincts: in the young, especially, a brute love of life or will to survive; in the old or middle-aged, a stubborn lingering fear of the unknown. As the forty-year-old Earl of Perth admitted, waiting uncertainly in prison on 29 December 1688: ‘the rabble curse and would tear me to pieces’ and ‘the prospect of approaching death cannot but be uneasy to flesh and blood’.49
It was not, then, that most people actively wanted to die. (Your end, after all, was in God’s hands, not your own.) Most would resort to medicine (and, as we shall see, often go to startling lengths in search of cures). But there was simply no hiding from the presence of death. Since the nineteenth century, this presence has been increasingly shut out of the general consciousness of Western Europe.50 It is worth bearing in mind that certain men and women of 1600 or 1700 would have found this separation as puzzling or offensive as we now find the idea of medicinal cannibalism. And this kind of distinction is crucial if we are to fully understand just how numerous sick people were able to eat, drink, or deliberately touch the bones and bodies of the dead in hope of cure. In doing so, they were not having to wrench themselves across the same fundamental divide as that which we now (mistakenly) perceive as a natural and universal barrier between the living and the dead. It may indeed have seemed to them more as if they were entering a kind of transitional zone, the space between the stoically endured pains of earthly life, and those shimmering expanses of blissful eternity which were the only true goal of all human existence. Let us now shift from the realm of death, to some of the particularly striking hardships of life and sickness in the early modern world.
Surgery
In late November 1526 Giovanni de Medici was struck by a cannonball in a battle against German troops. A few days later, on 10 December, that distinctive Renaissance man Pietro Aretino described the amputation of Giovanni’s gangrened leg. The patient was given ‘a soporific draught’, and Aretino was asked to fetch ‘eight or ten people … to hold him during the pain of the sawing’. Joking valiantly that ‘not even twenty would be enough’, Giovanni then ‘sat up with face as resolute as could be, and took in his own hands the candle that was to give light for the operation’.
Aretino, who at this point ‘fled from the room, and thrust my hands into my ears’, claims that he heard ‘only two groans’ as the saw ground and rasped through flesh and bone.51 For all his courage, Giovanni’s only reward was to be remembered in Aretino’s account. Like many others in such situations, he died just a few hours afterwards – apparently of blood poisoning, which may itself have been caused by the use of unsterilised instruments.52
Matters had not changed much in England, almost 150 years later. On 24 March 1672, John Evelyn watched ‘my surgeon cut off a poor creature’s leg, a little under the knee, first cutting the living and untainted flesh above the gangrene with a sharp knife, and then sawing off the bone in an instant’. The surgeon then staunched the blood (‘which issued abundantly’) by cauterising the wound. Meanwhile, ‘the stout and gallant man’ endured all ‘with incredible patience, and that without being bound to his chair, as is usual in such painful operations, or hardly making a face or crying oh’. Evelyn himself admits that he ‘had hardly courage enough to be present’, and ‘nor could I endure to see any more such cruel operations’. Once again, all this was in vain. The leg had been cut too low down, and gangrene remained further up. And so, Evelyn adds, ‘a second amputation of the thigh, cost the poor creature his life’.53
If you did survive, the mental trauma may well have been considerable. In 1580 the surgeon William Clowes explains how those performing such operations would need ‘a good strong form and a steady’ to lay the patient on, whilst bestriding ‘the form behind him’ must be ‘a man that is able to hold him fast by both his arms’. A second strong man was needed to ‘bestride the leg that is to be taken off, and he must hold fast the member above the place where the incision is to be made’ – not least because, if he had ‘a large hand and a good grip’, he could ‘the better stay the bleeding’. Having next ‘cut the flesh round about to the bones’, the surgeon must then ‘with a light hand speedily saw … off’ the leg. If you (the patient) had not already fainted after this, one doubts that you would refuse the ‘restrictive powder to stay the flux of blood’ which Clowes and others employed. His version included aloes and mummy, whilst his colleague John Banister used mummy and dragon’s blood, along with ‘the whites of eggs and hares’ hairs clipped so short as is possible’.54
You would probably think yourself similarly lucky if a surgeon such as Paul Barbette had managed successfully to stitch up your wounded guts – for which ‘you must … take a needle, thread it with a waxen thread, thrust it from without through the skin and muscles unto the very peritoneum … pierce it through, and the muscles and the skin also, drawing the lips together’; and, ‘seeing that by reason of the continual motion of the belly, your stitches may be easily undone, the rather, because the haste, sometimes here to be used, will not permit to make them with exactness, it is always necessary to apply to the wound a sticking-plaster’. Whether Barbette used the plaster, or his powdered mixture of aloes, mastic, frankincense, mummy, and dragon’s blood, there cannot have been many patients ready to begin neurotic arguments about the medical ethics of cannibalism at such a moment.55
Few things divide us so powerfully from the pre-clinical past as the torments of live surgery. In modern times, after all, the oblivion of anaesthetic is so complete that patients will not suffer so much as a nightmare. Seeing someone bound to a chair in a modern film, we will automatically as
sume that they are going to be tortured. And this was more or less what must have happened, on a routine basis, to thousands of men, women and children before medical science bestowed on the world those great chemical gifts of temporary oblivion, from ether and chloroform through to tiletamine–zolazepam.56
We must also remind ourselves that, if amputations were not common, they were far more so than in later centuries. First, gangrene was obviously a greater hazard than it would be now, which meant that relatively mild injuries could quickly become life-threatening. Moreover, to the colossal death tolls and maimings of continental wars, we must add the general violence of everyday life. Tellingly, some especially startling instances of this come from the casebook of the seventeenth-century surgeon Joseph Binns. In 1638, for example, Mr Robert Peyton received a fractured skull after being struck with a pottle pot by a Captain Nayle. In 1643 the lutenist Mr Ashberry had over an inch of his cheek bitten off by a French lutenist, M Gottier; and in that same year an eighty-year-old man begging alms was stabbed in the stomach by a Sergeant Major Jenkins.57 Nor was such aggression a purely adult monopoly. In 1731, for example, one Eton schoolboy, Dalton, stabbed and killed a boy named Cockram. Both were aged around twelve.58 Notice that these assaults were all committed by people of at least relatively high status – something which is consistent with the tendency to fight for points of honour, which in themselves so often came down to a mere matter of words.