Every house lookte like St. Bartholomew’s Hospitall, and every street like Bucklersbury, for poor Methridatum and Dragonwater (being both of them in all the world, scarce worth threepence) were boxt into every corner, and yet were both drunke every hour at other men’s cost. Lazarus lay groaning at every man’s door: marry no Dives was within to send him a crum (for all your Gold-finches were fled to the woods) nor a dogge left to licke his sores, for they (like Curres) were knockt downe like oxen, and fell thicker than acornes. I am amazed to remember what dead marches were made of three thousand trooping together: husbands, wives, and children being led as ordinarily to one grave as if they had gone to one bed. And those that could shift for a time, and shrink their heads out of the collar (as many did) yet went they most bitterly miching and muffled up and downe with rue and worme-wood stoft into their eares and nostrils, looking like so many bores’ heads stuck with branches of rosemary, to be served in for brawne at Christmas. This was a rare world for the Church, who had wont to complaine for want of living, and now had more living thrust upon her than she knew how to bestow: to have been clarke now to a parish clarke was better than to serve some foolish justice of peace, or than the yeare before to have been a benefice. * * * * * Never let any man aske me what became of our Phisitions in this massacre; they hid their synodicall heads as well as the prowdest: and I cannot blame them: for their phlebotomes, losinges, and electuaries, with their diacatholicons, diacodions, amulets and antidotes had not so much strength to hold life and soule together; as a pot of Pindar’s Ale and a nutmeg: their drugs turned to dirt, their simples were simple things: Galen could do no more than Sir Giles Goosecap: Hipocrates, Avicen, Paracelsus, Rafis, Fernalius, with all their succeeding rabble of doctors and water-casters were at their wits end, or, I think, rather at the world’s end, for not one of them durst peepe abroad, or if any did take upon him to play the ventrous knight, the plague put him to his nonplus: in such strange and such changeable shapes did this camelion-like sicknes appeare, that they could not (with all the cunning in their budgets) make pursenets to take him napping.”