Seeking Bargain Miracles: The 1665 Plague and America’s COVID Knowledge Crisis
by Devori Kimbro
A cursory glance at any social media platform now yields a dire epistemological battle. “Keyboard warriors,” as they’ve been dubbed by the president, flood the internet to alternatively declaim and tout various cures, treatments, and preventative tactics to counter the COVID-19 crisis now in its ninth month. While many accept traditional medical knowledge including wearing masks and washing hands to carefully cultivated twenty-second tunes, much of the world has drastically changed its behavior to attempt to stem the tide of the virus.
While masks and social distancing are demonstrably effective, some occupy a space of incredulity. Dr. Anthony Fauci becomes a “deep-state” operative. The virus could be prevented with hydroxychloroquine. COVID-19 is transmitted via 5G wireless networks. While a quick internet search debunks these assertions, the commentary is so pervasive that one cannot help but encounter someone who starts a conversation with “I read on the internet…” before exploring the latest COVID-19 conspiracy theory.
Even lauded political reporter Bob Woodward’s recent bombshell report providing taped February interviews of Trump confessing to “playing down” COVID while in the same breath discussing its 5% death rate and aerosol transmission has done little to calm the conspiracy theories as the election fast approaches. Trump’s own recent brush with COVID hasn’t changed his rhetorical approach to the virus. He claims frequently that antibody therapies like Remdesivir and Regeneron constituted “miracle cures” for COVID, failing to disclose that he was only the tenth person to receive one of the treatments experimentally, and that the other costs upwards of $3000 per course.
In the best of times, it seems easy to put your faith in highly-educated experts. But in the midst of a severe global crisis with so many unknowns looming, is it still that simple? When things seem uncertain, whom can you trust to truly “know” how to right a toppled worldview? Think-pieces of the last ten months have shown how even a mere hundred years ago when that pandemic killed approximately fifty-million globally, our ancestors grappled with similar questions: Who knows what this is? Who knows how to abate it? What if the cost of abatement (closing businesses, etc.) is too high?
At the core of our epistemological debate lurks another issue — socioeconomics. On average, a middle-class American is much better off than our poorest historical counterparts. When it comes to health care, however, we aren’t that far removed. While medical science has progressed significantly, the issue of who gets health care and how “affordable” it is in America may not look radically different than in past health crises like Jacobean London’s brush with the plague.
Yersinia pestis left a definite mark on the world many times, including the fourteenth century when it was called “The Black Death.” A smaller localized outbreak ravaged London in 1665, and around this outbreak raged a battle between two communities professing medical expertise. Institutions like the College of Physicians, the Society of Apothecaries, and the College of Barber-Surgeons (all supported by Charles II and his Royal Society) boasted “legitimate” physicians — men with years of study to their names. These professional societies who wanted to lay claim to sanctioned medical practice often publicly denigrated individuals who had built up years of practical medical experience as healers and midwives, the latter often dubbed “quacks.”
Several treatises of the time warn Londoners against availing themselves of the services of these dubious medical “professionals.” The plague exacerbated this divide. The people of London desperately needed medical attention and advice — if not to prevent the plague, then at least to reduce its spread and relieve its symptoms. As we’ve learned in our era of masks and hand sanitizers, a working populace is also concerned with how to keep themselves safe when “social distancing” isn’t an option. Ironically, London’s elite medical community found social distancing very effective. So effective, in fact, that as the death tolls mounted in London all but ten of the fifty members of the College of Physicians fled to the country.
Even if London had retained its full contingent of physicians and apothecaries throughout the 1665 outbreak, the poorer citizens of the city couldn’t have afforded the more specialized medical care offered by the health care community. Thus, the publication of herbals specifically addressing the plague and its symptoms, manuals, and receipt books represented a concerted effort by many of London’s remaining physicians to achieve a two-fold purpose. First, the pamphlets sought to acquaint readers with affordable means of preventing and treating plague. Second, such tracts often advertised relatively inexpensive compounds that were available for purchase from the publishing physicians and apothecaries. Such publications may have represented a good-faith effort to provide the poor with a means of comfort, but many of the methods prescribed therein were still beyond the reach of London’s poor.
“Plague pamphlets” were typically anywhere between five and twenty pages in octavo form, making them cheap and portable. The information was plague-specific, organized by symptom or phase of the illness for easy reference, such as in The Plagues Approved Physitian (1665) which begins with the causes of the plague, and then moves to plants and compounds useful for prevention and means of potentially curing the infected. Many plague pamphlets also identified their audience up front, often including variations of “poor” in the title. W.J.’s A Collection of Seven and Fifty approved Receipts Good against the Plague. Taken out of the Five Books of that Renowned Dr. Don Alexes Secrets, for the benefit of the poorer sort of people of these Nations (1665) demarcates the socioeconomic battle, synthesizing useful information in the title for those who could not afford a larger receipt book.
Among such sources, apothecary Richard Dixon’s broadsheet A Directory for the Poor, Against the Plague and Infectious Diseases is a remarkable artifact. The bookseller Thomas Rooks notes at the top of the broadsheet that he has “freely given the charge of Paper and printing of this publication; not doubting but all will reap the benefit thereof, in the time of this Visitation.” For his part, Dixon states that he views this as a challenge to not hide his “talent,” referencing the biblical proverb, and provides three short recipes: an “antidote,” a fever-reducer, and a poultice. He reminds the ill to be sure to hydrate, and Dixon ends his treatise by repeating the idea that wealth is no insulation from the dangers of plague, “from him that sitteth on the Throne, to him that grindeth at the Mill.”
My purpose here is not to insist there is some sort of innate nobility or logic to declaiming one form of medical knowledge over another. Medical science has advanced by leaps and bounds thanks in no small part to institutions like the College of Physicians and the Royal Society (though they were certainly problematic and exclusionary groups). What stands out in an exploration of this moment of medical history is how legitimizing epistemological battles are often rooted not in a fundamental mistrust of the knowledge itself, but rather how they ask us to confront the socioeconomic concerns around the access to knowledge.
Constant right-wing attacks on “educated elites” coupled with the high cost of medical care bear a striking resemblance to the same sort of ideological warfare happening in London’s medical pamphlet culture during the height of the 1665 plague. The primary difference in 2020 lies in what we consider “expertise.” London’s print market boasted two “expert” groups — the burgeoning professional medical community and those newly deemed “quacks.” Truthfully, their approaches to the plague were almost identical. Neither group really understood the complexities of the disease or how to prevent or cure it. The difference was that one group of experts stayed with their fellow citizens and offered affordable means of comfort for the sick and dying. Those who were financially and culturally set apart from the sick fled to country estates and smaller towns or offered prohibitively expensive treatments.
We’ve seen harrowing images of health care workers on the front lines this year. There are inescapable echoes of 1665 in our current system when it comes to socioeconomics. Within weeks of the pandemic hitting the US, social media was flooded with crowdfunding requests to pay COVID hospital bills or funeral expenses. In one heart-breaking instance, a COVID patient refused a ventilator in the late stages of his illness, asking “Who is going to pay for this?” Like those in 1665 London facing illness and death, the question of whom to believe in the year of COVID may be more driven by economics than we realize.
So what can we discover in an age when expertise is nullified by a quick internet search, which some claim gives them as much knowledge as eight years of medical school and decades of research and practice? One discovers that one-hundred doses of hydroxychloroquine cost less than $100. And thanks to privatization and capitalism in America’s healthcare system, someone may end up paying exorbitant rates to even find out if they’re infected with COVID. Our medical knowledge has come a long way since 1665, but thanks to unequal access in American health care, many today are listening to “quacks.” And it’s cost more than 210,000 lives, and counting.
Devori Kimbro earned her PhD in early modern literature from Arizona State University in 2015. She is currently a lecturer in English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga where she also teaches in the Honors College. Her work has appeared in Humanities and Prose Studies, and her essay exploring cultural trauma and John Foxe is forthcoming in a collection about memory and affect in early modern literature. Her primary research interests involve how English Protestants used exegetical models to develop a rhetoric of cultural religious trauma in pamphlets and other popular works. She is the co-host of the podcasts Remixing the Humanities and English Matters.
