Physicians had become a cause for contempt as many of them had abandoned Londoners to their fate during the plague of 1665, retreating to safer places in the country. Tom Brown (1662–1704), the English writer and satirist, was scathing about the medical profession. He wrote in his Amusements Serious and Comical Calculated for the Meridian of London:
These [physicians] … are pensioners to death … for you must know, not-withstanding distempered humours make a man sick, ’tis the physician has the honour of killing him, and expects to be well paid for the job … So that when a man is asked how such a man died, he is not to answer, according to custom, that he died of fever or a pleurisy, but that he died of the doctor.
One notorious practitioner was St John Long who set up a practice in 1828 in Harley Street. Despite being a registered doctor some of his methods were those of a charlatan. He became known as the ‘King of Quacks’ for his many cure-alls and dubious methods. His practice attracted many wealthy women and earned him in excess of £10,000 per year. His good looks and charm were clearly a factor in his success. Long’s use of lotions and inhalants, which involved yards of mysterious pink tubing, and his private massage sessions presented a novel alternative to the medicine provided by many of the other practitioners in Harley Street. However his luck ran out when two young women died as a result of his ‘unique’ treatment.
In 1830 a wealthy women sought out St John Long for the purpose of treating one of her two daughters who was suffering from consumption. His treatment made the girl’s condition more severe despite his claims that the girl’s health was remarkably well. As the condition of the girl deteriorated the services of an eminent surgeon were called for but the problem had gone beyond any possibility of a cure and the girl died. Long was charged with manslaughter and committed to Newgate to await his sentence. The sentence was lenient: a fine of £250. However at the same time public excitement was further aroused when a further charge of a similar nature was brought against him. This involved the death of forty-eight-year-old Mrs Campbell Lloyd, wife of Captain Edward Lloyd, RN. Her death was alleged to have been a result of the treatment she had experienced under the hands of Long. On this second charge Long was tried at the Old Bailey on 19 February 1831 but the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. Both cases ruined his career and he died at the age of thirty-six from tuberculosis.
The London Guide of 1818 warned, especially visitors to London, against the many ‘cheats, swindlers and pickpockets’. Included in these were an abundance of ‘nostrum-mongers who prepare some panacea, that will cure various and discordant disorders; thus playing with the lives … health and happiness of those who harken their advice. Whoever has been unfortunate enough to consult a certain loathsome disease, should be upon their guard against pretended doctors.’
The medical system from the sixteenth century moved from lay to medical expertise with many physicians writing books for popular audiences. There were a large number of medical books published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries giving advice on how the public could treat serious illnesses. Do-it-yourself manuals were published such as the one by John Archer, Every Man His Own Doctor (1672). Cure-alls and treatments were in plentiful supply although their effectiveness might be more uncertain. In the 1690s on Ludgate Hill, next door to the King’s Arms Tavern, a shop advertised such panaceas:
any person may be furnished with a Water for taking away the Freckles, Pimples, Worms and Morphew in the Face, Elixis Salutis, Balsamum Vitae, Tinctura Vitae. Water for the Eyes, Ointments for the Rickets, Burns, Scalds, Wounds.
Advertisements offering cures for venereal disease appeared in most newspapers during the eighteenth century. In January 1702 Mr Nedham, a ‘surgeon’ of Great Southampton Street, claimed in the English Post that for 3 shillings his ‘pleasant, gentle medicine’ cured the ‘clap or running of the reins’ (discharges from the kidneys). The Flaming Sword shop in Covent Garden boasted that the famous ‘Italian Bolus’ (large round pill) at 2 shillings and sixpence never fails ‘to root out and carry off the most malignant, virulent, and obstinate kind of the venereal disease’ (Mist’s Weekly Journal, 29 May 1725). Wrights of Bell-Savage Yard on Ludgate Hill left nothing to the imagination in promoting his cleansing tincture:
urinally discharges all the fæces or putrid relicks of the Lues Alamode [syphilis], and causes its concomitants, the wretched train of that complicated distemper, as a mucous, filthy, sanious matter [puss] lodg’d in the reins [kidneys], or spermatick parts, which either cause a sharpness in the urine, or too frequently provokes it.
The tincture, it was claimed, cleansed ‘the urinary passages of all sand, gravel, films, or membraneous pellicles … and all their genital parts, to their original tone and use, though the misfortune and decay be of the longest date, with an equal success in each sex.’ This wonder of medicine could be had for 10 shillings a bottle (Weekly Journal, or The British Gazetteer, 11 September 1725). If all the above failed then those ‘distressed to the last degree with the French disease [and] tired with taking medicines to no purpose, may have a fair, speedy, cheap, and safe cure.’ The Golden Ball in Fleet Street offered a medicine that would cure, for 5 shillings, not only ‘all symptoms of the French disease,’ but also rheumatism and scurvy (Weekly Journal, or The British Gazetteer, 5 March 1726). Venereal disease brought with it a terrible scarring as well as a potentially painful drawn-out death.
Other illnesses also brought immense pain and despite their relatively low annual mortality rates they appear each year in the Bills of Mortality. Such illnesses included stranguary (restricted urine flow also associated with ‘gravel’, a disease characterised by small stones formed in the kidneys); haemorrhoids; scurvy, sores and ulcers. As with all other illnesses and diseases, cures were readily available, albeit at a price. In July 1726 six stones were removed from a man at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, ‘one as big as a turkey’s egg, two as a pigeon’s, the others as a nutmeg.’ Rider’s Lozenges could be bought from John Finder of Bartholomew Close in Smithfield and they could cure, so it was claimed, ‘Heart-burn, Hiccough, Belching, Stranguary, and other Distempers.’ Haemorrhoids were guaranteed never to return by using ‘a pleasant Specifick Electuary’ from Jacob’s Coffee House in Threadneedle Street. Mr Radford’s Toyshop on the Strand provided a pleasant ‘Odoriferous Tincture, which after a few drops, would instantly make the most offensive breath smell incomparably fine and charming.’ A ‘famed elixir’ from Mr Spooner’s near Whitechapel could relieve wind, belches or hiccups.
Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries there was a constant risk of being injured by badly-constructed buildings made from poor quality goods and shoddy workmanship, particularly during bad storms. In June 1553 Henry Machyn recorded that a house fell down in St Clement’s Lane whereby ‘the good man of the house was killed and the good wife sore hurt and the maid’. Nicholas Hawksmoor, the architect, commented that London was less of a city of houses and streets than a ‘Chaos of Dirty Rotten sheds, always Tumbling or taking fire’. The bills of mortality for the week recorded twenty-one deaths in London from the fall of chimneys. The English Post reported as ‘violent a storm of wind as was ever known in England … many people were kill’d on their beds, and several wounded.’ The Post reported on the ‘blowing down of trees in St. James’s Park, the Inns of Court, Moor-Fields, and divers other places.’ In 1725 a ‘violent hurricane’ hit London and again several chimneys were blown down and much damage was done as well as a number of deaths: ‘Four or five drowned persons have been taken up above bridge, some others are not yet found’ (Mist’s Weekly Journal).
Up to at least the nineteenth century people suffered pain because there was little relief in treatment or relief such as anaesthetics, surgery or drugs. The Church attempted to offer some explanation by suggesting that pain was an aspect of God’s interaction with humankind rather than it actually being the body that was in distress. With the developments in medicine and surgery there was, by the late nineteenth century, a si
gnificant shift in the understanding of pain. This development removed the idea of God’s interaction with the body to one whereby pain was a medical challenge.
Between 1870 and 1901 London’s mortality rate fell, in line with the national trend, and much of this was a result of improvements in public health and preventative medicine and the decline of particular infectious diseases such as whooping cough and scarlet fever, tuberculosis, typhoid, smallpox, typhus and cholera. London however was by no means purged of the sources of lethal disease and much of the poverty in which such conditions thrived remained to be expunged. The longstanding problem of air pollution or smog – fog that has soot in it – continued to take its toll until effective measures were taken against it in the 1950s and 1960s.
13
Chronicling Death
Many writers, demographers, statisticians and epidemiologists have addressed the issue of death and the causes of death in London over the centuries through poetry, diaries, chronicles, private correspondence, literature, surveys and commentaries. Writing in the aftermath of the Black Death were Geoffrey Chaucer (1340–1400) and the fourteenth-century poet William Langland (1330–87). Langland is believed to have lived for many years in London at Cornhill, with his wife Kitte and his daughter Calote. His poem Piers the Ploughman tells the story of Piers, a simple countryman, who, like Langland, was poor. In his poem Langland reflects on death and how ‘The grave equates us all.’ Langland witnessed the worst effects of the bubonic plague. Consistent with the medieval belief that the plague was a punishment from God, Langland believed that there was a relationship between pestilence and the sins of people. For him, the plague punished a morally corrupt society, a society that had turned towards pride:
Friars and frauds have faked-up such questions
For the pleasure of proud men since the pestilence,
And preached at St Paul’s from pure envy of the clergy …
Throughout the whole realm, pride has spread so much
… prayers are powerless to stop the pestilence.
Geoffrey Chaucer was little more than eight years of age when the plague struck his hometown of London. In the prologue to his Canterbury Tales he refers to the conduct of some of the characters during the plague. Where Langland had been critical of the Church, Chaucer praised the clergyman who did not abandon his flock. Chaucer wrote of the pestilence in the ‘Pardoner’s Tale’:
Ther cam a privee theef men clepeth Deeth,
That in this contree al the peple sleeth,
And with his spere he smoot his herte atwo,
And wente his wey withouten wordes mo.
He hath a thousand slayn this pestilence.
(There came a sneakthief men call Death,
Who kills all the people in this country,
And with his spear he smote his heart in two,
And went his way without a word
He has killed a thousand this plague-time).
It is likely that Chaucer lived through at least five outbreaks of the plague and, like Langland, must have heard masses for the dead and the tolling of bells in London. In the ‘Pardoner’s Tale’ drunken revellers, who survive the plague, hear the ringing bells outside the tavern which tells them a corpse is being taken away. However there is also a moral tone in which the Pardoner suggests that money is corrupt and that all humans must be prepared to die. The issues of death, the Apocalypse and the importance of life on earth and life after death were themes taken up by other writers over the centuries following Chaucer.
The diary of the sixteenth-century tailor and furnisher of funeral trappings, Henry Machyn, provides us with a detailed insight into many funerals in London between 1550 and 1563. He wrote his diary during a very turbulent period in England which saw the Reformation followed by the return to Catholicism under Mary. Machyn was born in May 1497 and arrived in London around 1519 to take up an apprenticeship. By 1530 he was admitted to the Company of Merchant Tailors. Machyn was married and had two children, Jane and John, but his first wife, Joan, died in childbirth in 1548. The Machyn family lived in the City not far from Painter Stainers Hall on Trinity Street. Henry and his brother, Christopher, were both tailors but the latter died in 1550. Machyn was apparently a Catholic and this can be seen in his enthusiasm for the succession of Mary in 1553. His diary documents accounts of funerals which vary from the execution of felons to the procession of eminent citizens.
Machyn records that in May 1552 six felons were executed and two months later James Ellis, described as ‘a great cutpurse and thief’, was hanged. In December two ‘tall’ men and a ‘lackey’ were executed for robbery. In January 1553 two men were killed for the murder of a gentleman and one hanged and quartered for counterfeiting the Queen’s signet. Henry Machyn made clear that he attended two and sometimes three executions per day. In the space of one month in 1557 Machyn saw eight felons hanged at Tyburn, three men and two women burnt at Smithfield for heresy and seven pirates hanged at Wapping. Like many Londoners, Machyn witnessed executions as part of the popular calendar ritual.
In July 1551 he recorded an outbreak of the plague which killed 872 people in London. On the tenth day the king, Edward VI (r. 1547–1553), was ‘removed from Westminster unto Hampton Court.’ The plague clearly took its toll as ‘there died in London many merchants and great rich men and women and young men and old.’ Two years later in August 1553 young Edward died and ‘at his burying was the greatest moan made for him of his death as ever was heard or seen.’ In April 1554 Sir Thomas Wyatt and his followers organised a rebellion against the Catholic queen, Mary. Those arrested were executed at different sites in London. Wyatt was taken to the Tower where he was ‘quartered on the scaffold and his bowels and his members burnt beside the scaffold there.’ Machyn, although less known than many diarists who followed him, left a fascinating chronicle of life and death in mid-sixteenth-century London.
The following century produced famous diarists such as Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn (1620–1706). Both kept accounts of London during the tumultuous decade of the 1660s. Pepys provides an often quoted source for the Great Plague of 1665 in which he reflected that, ‘Every day sadder and sadder news of its increase. In the City died this week 7,496; and all of them, 6,102 of the plague’. Evelyn also noted the extent of the plague when on 13 September 1665, he wrote ‘There perished this Weeke 5,000’ and by 28 August ‘The Contagion growing now all about us.’ By September he recorded that there were ‘perishing now neere ten-thousand poore Creatures weekely’.
Evelyn was also among a long line of writers to bemoan the state of the air and smoke that pervaded London. In 1661, he wrote Fumifugium, or the Inconvenience of the Aer and the Smoak of London Dissipated. London had a reputation from the thirteenth century for its smoky atmosphere resulting from the massive concentration of coal burning in stoves and grates, both industrial and domestic. Evelyn complained, ‘this horrid Smoake which obscures our Churches, and makes our Palaces look old, which fouls our Clothes, and corrupts the waters, so as the very Rain, and refreshing Dews which fall in the several Seasons, precipitate this impure vapour, which, with its black and tenacious quality, spots and contaminates whatsoever is expos’d to it’. Not surprisingly with the heavy use of seacoal, street names such as Seacole Lane appeared as early as 1228. Evelyn raged that the columns of smoke in London meant that ‘inhabitants breathe nothing but an impure and thick mist, accompanied by a fuliginous and filthy vapour … corrupting the lungs and disordering the entire habit of their bodies, so ... such coughing and snuffling to be heard as in the London churches where the barking and spitting is incessant and importunate’. Evelyn argued that the fumes were unhealthy and the great stinking fogs caused high mortality rates. Unfortunately he could not support his arguments with statistical and scientific evidence – this would have to wait for the work of others.
Evelyn’s views about the foul air found expression in other writers who used London’s pea-soupers to create a murky and threatening atmosphere. Such scenes
found expression in fiction. For example in Bleak House (1853) by Charles Dickens (1812–70):
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city … Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards.
In Our Mutual Friend (1865) he comments that the ‘whole metropolis was a heap of vapour charged with the muffled sound of wheels and enfolding a gigantic catarrh.’ In the Bruce Partington Plans (1908), a Sherlock Holmes story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the narrator Watson writes, ‘In the third week of November, in the year 1895, a dense yellow fog settled down upon London. From the Monday to the Thursday I doubt whether it was ever possible from our windows in Baker Street to see the loom of the opposite houses.’
John Stow (1525–1605) published his Survey of London towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign in 1598. Stow was born in the parish of St Michael in Cornhill and became a tailor like his father. He was witness to many great changes in London and these are reflected in his Survey. This was the first of its kind to be published and is significant in that it provides an insight into the City as it was before the devastation of the Great Fire more than sixty years later. Prior to his Survey he had also written other works including his Annales or a General Chronicle of England (1580). Despite his labours, writing did not bring its rewards and he lived in poverty until he died in 1605. He was granted a licence to beg in 1604 but he died shortly after from stone colic and was buried in the church of St Andrew Undershaft.
Although Stow’s work draws upon oral tradition and his own observations about the architecture, social conditions, customs, occupations and commerce of London, he offered insights into aspects of death including tombs, epitaphs, monuments, sickness, plague, accidents, catastrophes, executions, leper houses and a special Single Woman’s Churchyard for those who did not offer a deathbed repentance. His account of the growth of London comments upon catastrophes such as the fire at the Church of Our Lady of the Canons in 1212, during which great multitudes of people came over London Bridge either to quench the fire or to gaze at it. The wind spread the fire to the south end of the bridge and ‘then came many ships and vessels, into which the multitude so unadvisedly rushed that the ships drowned [and] all perished.’ Stow tells us that the fire and the shipwreck ‘destroyed about three thousand persons, whose bodies were found in part, or half burnt, besides those who were wholly burnt to ashes’. He reminds us of the common nature of fires and the vulnerability of people in houses that were timber framed. Stow writes that in 1484 ‘a great fire happened upon this Leadenhall, by what casualty I know not, but much housing was there destroyed.’ In 1538 in the churchyard of St Margaret’s in the Billingsgate Ward ‘among the basket-makers, a great and sudden fire … within the space of three hours consumed more than a dozen houses, and nine persons.’ He comments on the regular visitation of plagues, such as that of 1515 which killed twenty-seven people in a nunnery near Aldgate.
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