by Ian Mortimer
Perhaps most unpleasant of all the things you can find in an apothecary’s shop are the human body parts. Most apothecaries will stock mummia – powdered mummified corpses from Egypt. Pepys goes to see one that has not yet been ground up at a merchant’s warehouse in May 1668, noting that the body is all black and hard. The vendor gives him an arm as a souvenir. What could be the medical uses of powdered mummy? Rub it into your skin, you’ll be told, to improve the tone. Alternatively, dissolve mummia in alcohol and drink it to cure internal bleeding. In fact, why stop at Ancient Egyptian bodies? A good apothecary will be able to supply you with the fat of recently deceased men to rub into your aching joints. The same unguent is also supposed to cure the scars of smallpox pustules. Charles II consumes powdered skulls in alcohol. This isn’t some quack cure: it is recommended to the king on good medical authority. The noted physician Dr Thomas Willis – the holder of two medical degrees, a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians – prescribes a mixture of powdered human skull, ambergris, musk and chocolate as a remedy for apoplexy. The great scientist Robert Boyle also recommends powdered human skull as a medicine in cases of convulsions.57 And Thomas Brugis has this recipe for the ‘falling sickness’ (epilepsy):
[Take] a man’s skull that has been dead but one year, bury it in the ashes behind the fire, and let it burn until it be very white, and easy to be broken with your finger; then take off all the uppermost part of the head to the top of the crown, and beat it as small as is possible; then grate a nutmeg, and put to it, and the blood of a dog dried and powdered; mingle them all together, and give [it to] the sick to drink … both when he is sick, and also when he is well, the quantity of half a dram at a time in white wine.58
It sounds like a witch’s brew. Frankly, the idea that smoking tobacco is good for your health is looking increasingly attractive.
SURGEONS
Whereas physicians traditionally deal with the inward illnesses of the body, surgeons deal with the outward aspects – problems of the skin, wounds, tumours, the breaking of bones, and so forth. As a result, their tasks tend to be less theoretical than those of the physicians, involving less ancient nonsense about humours and more practical observation. Indeed, many surgeons are very effective – for the good reason that, in a violent age, they have plenty of opportunities to practise. People are constantly injuring themselves and getting into fights. Many surgeons serve with the army or navy and learn such things as how to cauterise a wound or amputate a limb in the heat of battle. Even a surgeon working at one of the two London hospitals – St Bartholomew’s and St Thomas’s – will see a regular stream of broken and fractured limbs from road-traffic accidents and building-site calamities; rapier wounds from duels; gunshot wounds from murder attempts; and knife wounds from drunken fights. Add to these the skin diseases, swellings, spots, tumours, ulcers, buboes, aneurisms, hernias, fistulas, polyps, wens and rashes that occur on a daily basis, and you can see that a hospital surgeon works hard for his salary of £30 per year.
Having said a surgeon’s work involves less theoretical nonsense than a physician’s, there are elements that will cause you to scratch your head in disbelief. One of these is phlebotomy. The idea of drawing blood from a patient persists for a remarkably long time – long after the humoral theory that gave rise to it has fallen by the wayside. We have come across people having their blood let – Robert Hooke’s servant, Tom Giles, in 1677 (for smallpox) and Charles II in 1685 (for apoplexy) – but almost everyone experiences it at some time in their life. Pepys has 16oz of blood drawn from his arm in 1662 – purely as a prophylactic precaution – and his arm is so badly affected the next day that he has to stay at home.59 The experience costs him the large sum of 5s, too.60 It is not money well spent. Phlebotomy weakens the body and unnecessarily puts you at risk of blood poisoning. Joseph Binns, a surgeon at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, has to deal with several cases of bloodletting that result in gangrene.61
The other aspect of a surgeon’s practice that will astonish you is the degree to which he will depend on laxatives. The first thing Joseph Binns does when faced with a new case is to prescribe a suppository, clyster or enema – anything to empty the patient’s bowels. Headache? You’ll be needing a laxative, sir. Broken leg from a cart accident? Laxative. Gunshot wound? Laxative first, then I’ll remove the bullet. An ale-drawer at the Castle Tavern in Paternoster Row goes to see Binns after he has been smashed in the head with a tankard. Binns prescribes a suppository. Then he lets blood. And only after these two things have been done does he remove the splintered bone, dress the wound using warm medications and bandage up the patient’s head. Before the patient leaves, Binns writes him a prescription of a suppository every day. The man recovers – as do the majority of Binns’s patients, to be fair – but you suspect that if they gathered at the Castle to discuss their experience, they would all remark on how keen their surgeon is to make them shit like crazy. He even prescribes a laxative in a case of diarrhoea.62
The nature of surgery means that surgeons have to see their patients in person – they cannot simply diagnose by letter or by messenger, as some physicians do. This means that they tend to spread themselves out around the country, basing themselves in even the smallest towns. They build up relationships with people in their neighbourhoods and so they often obtain a medical licence on the strength of a petition signed by present and former clients. And because they are often the only medical practitioner in the area, they increasingly take on the role of a physician as well, diagnosing internal ailments and prescribing medicines. Thus they too start to be called ‘doctors’, even if they do not have any sort of medical degree. Some obtain licences to practise both medicine and surgery. In their practices you can see the beginnings of the modern General Practitioner’s role.
When all is said and done, however, these men are still surgeons, and anaesthetics are still more than a century away in the future. That means these men are probably going to cause you more pain than you have ever imagined. You only need to take one glance into a surgeon’s tool case to realise that your nerves are going to be severed and shredded, your blood is about to be spilled as freely as ale in a drunken man’s tankard, and your bones are going to be lucky if they manage to retain the strength and consistency of custard. The shiny metal specula are enough to make you shudder – both the wide, screw-threaded ones for keeping your mouth wide open during dental work, and the narrow ones with teeth, for extracting objects in difficult-to-reach cavities. When you then see the scalpels, the knives, the skull saws, the bone saws, the pliers, the 18-inch-long pincers, the razors, the specially curved amputating knives, the drills for trepanning, the elevatorium biploidum (for lifting a smashed part of the skull), the syrin-gotome (for opening fistulas) and the oversized sharp fork (used for mastectomies), you are going to quail.
One of the most feared regular operations – perhaps second only to limb amputation – is the ‘cutting for the stone’. If you have a case of calculus in your bladder, not only will you feel excruciating pain but you will also regularly be pissing blood, vomiting and experiencing severe chills. The condition is dangerous – between forty and sixty people die of it every year in London. But the treatment is not exactly a walk in the park, either. It involves you being tied down to an operating table and having a 3-inch (7.5cm) incision made by the surgeon between your scrotum and your anus. He will then pull your nether regions apart, exposing the bladder, and will slice into this; when there is a big enough hole in your bladder, he will insert his fingers to feel for the offending article. When Pepys undergoes this operation, the surgeon, Thomas Holier, pulls out a stone the size of a snooker ball.63 In his case, the calculated risk pays off. Not only does Pepys celebrate with a massive slap-up meal on the anniversary of the operation every year thereafter, but he freely offers advice to other people who are suffering from bladder stones. In 1669 John Evelyn persuades Pepys to show his stone to his brother, Richard, who is very worried about the operation.
Pepys succeeds in talking Richard into it, and the date is set but, at the last minute, Richard backs out. He dies in agony in May 1670, although the stone in his bladder is later found to be no larger than a nutmeg.64
From a surgical point of view, however, cutting for the stone is one of the definite surgical success stories of the age: twenty times as many people die from the condition as die from the treatment. If you ever find yourself thinking that seventeenth-century medical knowledge is no good, think again. It could well save your life.
11
Law and Disorder
Lady Alice Lisle isn’t your typical revolutionary. For a start, she’s a gentlewoman. She’s in her seventies, somewhat deaf, deeply religious and doesn’t travel far from her beautiful home, Moyles Court in Hampshire. She has had nothing to do with politics for the last twenty years – ever since her husband, John Lisle, an MP who signed King Charles I’s death warrant, was assassinated by two Irish extremists while in exile in Switzerland. However, when the duke of Monmouth clashes with forces loyal to King James II at the Battle of Sedgemoor on 6 July 1685, his defeat sets in motion a train of unforeseeable events. On 25 July, a nonconformist clergyman, John Hickes, who is in hiding with a friend after the battle, sends a note to Lady Alice asking if he and his companion can stay at Moyles Court. She innocently says yes, and invites them to dine with her that evening. A local labourer informs the military commander in the region, Colonel Penruddock, that Lady Alice is harbouring fugitives from justice. Penruddock searches the house and grounds the next morning and discovers Hickes and his friend hiding in a malthouse. He arrests them and their hostess, and takes all three to Winchester to stand trial. After a month in prison awaiting the arrival of the Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, Lady Alice enters the dock. She is accused of sheltering traitors. That would be bad news in any circumstances, but two things make her situation very grave indeed. One is that her trial is the first of about cases concerning the supporters of the duke of Monmouth, so it is going to set the tone for the rest. The other is that the Chief Justice who will hear her case is none other than George Jeffreys, better known to you as Judge Jeffreys, probably the most notorious judge in all English legal history. He ruthlessly tears apart the testimony of those bold enough to speak in Lady Alice’s defence. After a trial lasting six hours – a very long time by the standards of the day – the jury find her guilty, and Judge Jeffreys sentences her to be burnt alive for high treason. Traumatised, Lady Alice appeals to the king for mercy. James II decides that ruthlessness is the best policy. He merely changes the sentence from burning to beheading. On 2 September 1685 Lady Alice is led out of the inn where she has spent her last night and makes a short speech from the scaffold. She forgives those who have acted against her but insists that her only crime was to shelter a minister of the Church, on the grounds that he was a man of the cloth. She then kneels down and her head is cut off with an axe.1
Lady Alice’s fate could have been worse. A few weeks later, Elizabeth Gaunt is accused in London of arranging the accommodation of her friend James Burton, who is also in hiding after Sedgemoor. When Burton is caught, he turns king’s evidence and betrays Elizabeth. She is tried at the Old Bailey for treason on 19 October 1685. Although there is no evidence of her actually acting against the king – only that she helped Burton – she is found guilty and sentenced to be burnt to death. Her pleas for clemency fall on deaf ears. King James even refuses her the mercy of being strangled prior to being engulfed in flames. On 23 October she is taken to Tyburn. On the scaffold she holds up a Bible and makes a speech in which she declares that she only arranged to shelter Burton out of care for his wife and children, ‘in obedience to the contents of this book’. She then arranges the straw of her pyre around her and dies with great dignity despite the agony – ‘in such a manner that all the spectators melt in tears’.2 Burton, the real traitor to James II, receives a royal pardon in return for betraying her.
These two examples of justice are not everyday occurrences, but they are indicative of common attitudes to the law. If you are accused of a crime, your highest priority will be that you have a fair trial. But in the seventeenth century the justice system has higher priorities, such as the safety of the monarch, the stability of the realm and the supremacy of the Anglican religion. Many judges would rather see a miscarriage of justice than set a suspected traitor free. Another strikingly different priority is the determination of many judges to uphold the law by applying the most horrific punishments possible. This is why Elizabeth Gaunt is burnt alive for her charity. Ironically, it is also why she sets about facing death so stoically – to show that the punishment is not so terrible that it makes her regret her actions. In the modern world we don’t need such ghastly punishments as beheading old ladies or burning women to death to keep the vast majority of people on the straight and narrow; the near certainty of being caught and spending a long time in gaol is normally a sufficient deterrent. But in an age when it is difficult to track down a criminal, all the emphasis has to be placed on the agony that the state can inflict; it has no other methods at its disposal.
Another priority of the judges who will sit in judgement on you is the maintenance of the social order. As a result, the protection of land and chattels is considered far more important than the protection of mere lives. You can be hanged for the theft of something worth a few shillings but merely branded for killing a man or beating a servant to death. Nor is this emphasis weakening: from the 1690s, crimes against property that merit the death penalty are added to the statute books at the rate of about one per year.3 If you think this is wrong – that a life is more valuable than possessions – then brace yourself for worse. Certain crimes committed by women are dealt with more harshly than those by men, for in carrying them out, women upset the natural order of things. If a man kills his wife, the crime is murder and the worst punishment is hanging; but if a woman kills her husband, the crime is petty treason and the punishment is to be burnt alive. In some cases, women are judged with a presumption of guilt. The Infanticide Act of 1624 presumes that an unmarried mother whose baby dies is guilty of killing the infant. Unless she can show that she is married or that the child was suffering from an illness, it will be deemed ‘undeniable’ that she killed her baby by strangulation and she will hang for murder.
The moral climate of the time demands that certain crimes are dealt with especially severely. Consider bigamy: what do you think is an appropriate punishment for someone who has married a second husband or a second wife? You might say that, as divorce is impossible, it is likely to happen quite often, and thus is an unremarkable crime – if it is a crime at all – and so the most appropriate punishment would be a fine. Restoration judges often deliver a sentence of death. Sixty-one people are indicted for bigamy at the Old Bailey between 1674 and 1700; thirty are found guilty, and six of those are sentenced to hang. James Cary, for example, marries Ann Clear in 1681 and, having left her, marries Mary Sergeant in 1694. The case being proved upon him by production of the 1681 parish register, he is found guilty and hanged. Similarly in 1693 Mary Stokes is accused of having married four men. She is hanged because she is ‘an idle kind of slut, for she would get what money she could of them and then run away’.4 One university-educated man who is said to have married no fewer than seventeen rich old women up and down the country is brought to the Old Bailey in 1676. He pleads guilty to four offences, confident in the knowledge that he will be transported to the West Indies. He obviously fancies a life overseas, seducing plantation owners’ widows. The judge shakes his head and sentences him to the gallows.5
Other crimes are punished severely on account of their being considered against nature. Foremost among these are unlawful sex acts, which include rape, sodomy and bestiality. Marital rape is not a crime, as a man may do what he wants with his wife, and the rape of a servant is likewise not considered contrary to the order of things. However, outside the household, sexual crimes are taken seriously. The law is especially severe on men w
ho force themselves on girls under the age of ten, who are deemed too young to be able to give their consent. Sadly, law courts regularly have to try men like William Harding, who in 1680 entices the eight-year-old Sarah Southy into a cellar by offering her apples; there he rapes her, stopping her mouth to prevent her from crying out. The crime is only discovered because he infects her with venereal disease. As for sodomy, this is a capital offence even when consensual (as explained in chapter 4). When not consensual, juries find it particularly horrific. Mustapha Pochowachett is a Turk who shares his bed with his fourteen-year-old Dutch servant, Anthony Bassa; one night in 1694 he stops the boy’s cries with a pillow and rapes him: the jury has no hesitation in sentencing Pochowachett to death for buggery.6
Such is the level of revulsion caused by some reported sexual acts that the normal standards of evidence and judgement are suspended. A case in 1677 illustrates this well, and is worth quoting at length:
A married woman lately living without Cripplegate, that appeared to be between 30 and 40 years of age, was arraigned for that she having not the fear of God before her eyes, nor regarding the order of nature, on the 23 of June last, to the disgrace of all womankind, did commit buggery with a certain mongrel dog, and wickedly, devilishly, and against nature had venereal and carnal copulation with him. It was proved that the prisoner was a person of a lewd conversation, and lodging in a room into which there were several holes to look in at from the next house, they had often seen her in the very acts of uncleanness with villains that followed her; but one day one of the witnesses (a young woman) happening to cast her eye in, saw her use such actions with a dog as are not fit here to be recited. At which being amazed, she called up another woman, and after that a man, who all saw her several times practising this beastliness, and fully evidenced the same in court, where the dog was likewise brought, and being set on the bar before the prisoner, owned her by wagging his tail and making motions as it were to kiss her, which it was sworn she did do when she made that horrid use of him. For herself she had nothing to say, but denying the fact, alleging it was malice in the witnesses, which her husband, who appeared in her behalf likewise suggested, but could not make out any quarrel or occasion of any such malice in the least; whereupon after full consideration of all circumstances she was brought in guilty.7