3/18/2024 0 Comments Plague doctor names![]() ![]() ![]() While the city took some measures to stem the tide of disease-including boarding up houses with known cases and keeping a careful record of deaths-they were less successful than the public-health campaigns waged in Venice, which as early as 1348 identified the need for unified civic and medical leadership during emergencies. The first is that quacks thrive in a vacuum.Ībandoned by trained doctors, London’s residents had few options besides tonic peddlers and unlicensed chemists. It seems the quacks of the past have a few lessons to teach us. In certain ways, London’s plague year might feel eerily like a prelude to our present one. This was as true in 1665 as it was centuries earlier during the ravages of the Black Death, as well as centuries later, during the global influenza pandemic of 1918. During pandemics and “plague years,” quacks are at their busiest. ![]() Some were probably well-intentioned healers who stayed out of duty to their patients, but others recognized the lucrative business opportunity at hand. When the doctors fled London’s “Great Plague,” the quacks remained behind. Instead they plied their trade on street corners and at country fairs, hawking homemade remedies in loud, attention-grabbing voices-hence the term quack, likening their cries to noisy ducks or geese.ĭetail of De kwakzalver (The Quack), attributed to Dutch painter Jan Steen, ca. (Nostrums were the over-the-counter medications of the early modern world, available without a doctor’s prescription and taken at one’s own risk.) Quacks during this time were unregulated practitioners, many of whom were too uneducated to enter physicians’ guilds or too “low-born” to be welcomed by medical colleges. The term quack originates from quacksalver, or kwakzalver, a Dutch word for a seller of nostrums, medical cures of dubious and secretive origins. every one was at liberty to prescribe what nostrum he pleased, and there was scarce a street in which some antidote was not sold, under some pompous title.” What were London’s working classes to do? They turned to the quacks, of course.Īs English surgeon Dale Ingram later observed, without licensed physicians, “recourse was had to chymists, quacks. They were free to run in the opposite direction of danger. The London College of Physicians, which governed the licensing of doctors within a 7-mile radius of the city, had no rules demanding its members stay in residence during a plague or pandemic. Unfortunately for those left behind, the flight from the city included many of its most prominent doctors. Those with the financial means to escape to the countryside did just that. In 1665 an outbreak of bubonic plague ravaged London. ![]()
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