The Great Plague of 1665 and Early Modern Medicine

Old treatments carry on, and a plague returns

In the early modern period the old treatments carried on almost unchanged, and when the Great Plague struck in 1665 the response showed how little medicine had really moved since 1348.

Much stayed the same

• Everyday medicine changed very little: the four humours, bloodletting, purging and herbal remedies were still the main treatments.
• Women remained the main healers in most homes, using books of herbal remedies to nurse the family and deliver babies.
• Unqualified "quacks" went on selling fake cures to desperate people throughout the period.

Some new ideas arrived

Alongside the old methods, a few genuinely new ideas began to appear.

• Paracelsus argued that specific chemicals, such as mercury and antimony, could treat specific diseases, rather than just rebalancing the humours.
• Cinchona bark, brought from South America in the 1630s, gave quinine, the first real treatment for malaria.
• Apothecaries, who mixed and sold medicines, became a regulated profession from the 1600s.

The Great Plague of 1665

• The Great Plague hit London in 1665 and killed around 100,000 people.
• People still blamed miasma (bad air), God's punishment and the planets, though some now suspected the disease passed from person to person.
• The authorities shut infected houses up for 40 days, with a red cross painted on the door and a watchman posted outside.
• Searchers, usually older women, recorded the dead, and weekly Bills of Mortality counted the deaths across London.

How little had changed since 1348

• The response in 1665 was better organised than in 1348, with quarantine, record-keeping and street cleaning ordered from above.
• But the basic understanding had not moved: no one knew about the bacterium or the fleas, and the treatments were still useless.
• The outbreak faded as colder weather set in, and the Great Fire of London in 1666 burned down many of the rat-infested streets.