The Plaguy Body: Part II

Abstract

Whilst Bullein’s socially aspiring and reprehensible Medicus located the worst focus of the 1563 London plague in the ‘sluttishe, beastly people, that keepe their houses and lodynges uncleane . . . their laboure and travaile immoderate’ (p. 51), the complete Dialogue conveys the opposite impression. A rich merchant and an affluent citizen fall victims to the pestilence, their sins as extortioners increasing their susceptibility to infection. Interestingly, no poor people catch the disease in the Dialogue, though they do suffer when their rich masters succumb to plague. Significantly, though, Medicus’ negative, judgemental account of the living conditions and habits of the ‘beastly people’ appears to anticipate dominant constructions of the ‘base sort’ in later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century élite discourses — particularly those of the Protestant establishment (in church, medicine and state). By putting such words into the mouth of a greedy, unpleasant, extortioner/physician, Bullein was undoubtedly highlighting, and expressing timely disapproval of, his society’s increasing tendency to identify the growing numbers of ‘have nots’ (the unemployed, immigrants, disbanded soldiers, who were flocking to the capital) as the disease polluters and criminals of the metropolis — the burgeoning ‘plaguy body’ of early modern London.