SAMUEL PEPYS AND HIS : A DIGRESSION, MAINLY MEDICAL.

H. S. CARTER, m.d., d.p.h.

' Ill a recently published essay appropriately entitled Feuestralia,' Sir Max Beerbohm has allowed his fancy to play agreeably for a few minutes on the subject of windows ; on windows as frames for those looking out, from the mother of Sisera peering through her lattice to Gladstone orating vehemently from the window of a railway carriage ; and on windows through which one may gaze at the world and the human spectacle, as on a play framed in the confines of a stage. Sir Max has always been fond of windows. Zuleika Dobson saw from her window the ' ' upturned and moonlit face of the Duke of Dorset just before she temporarily extinguished that nobleman with a well-aimed cascade of water : and most of Max's drawings are surely pictures seen through the window of his mind's eye which has a defining power sharply illuminating character or episode to the point of criticism. Magic casements ! Samuel Pepys, who as a boy saw Charles I. executed in , leaned out of one and wrote down what he saw. He did more, for he turned his head and described for us naively the privacies of his own halls and apartments. Whoever is well acquainted with the diary of Samuel Pepys, and more so who, through Mr. Arthur Bryant's recent studies, also knows something of Pepys' later life, has seen a period of history unveiled ; has seen the observant leaning from his seventeenth century window, and has had unrolled for him a panorama of the contemporary scene. He has had a view of the latter half of the seventeenth century, and for the nine and a half years of the Diary, window-seat pictures of the whole fascinating scene vividly recorded by Pepys from his point of vantage with garrulous persistence, considerable artistry, uninhibited comment and amazing self-revelation. Pepys was an acute observer and avid of the life around him. Here is a picture worthy of a painter, one only of many. On May-day, 1667, Pepys is 011 his way from his house in Seething Ivane to Westminster, when he sees ' Nell Gwynn : Thence to Westminster, in the way meeting many milk- maids with their garlands upon their pails, dancing with a fiddler before them : and saw pretty Nelly standing at her lodgings' door in Drury Lane in her smock sleeves and bodice looking upon one : she seemed a mighty ' pretty creature.' The old house in Drury Iyane, once the Cock and Magpie,' where Nell Gwynn was supposed to have lived was pulled down only in 1891. 212 PEPYS' DIARY?CARTER 213

Pepys had an insatiable curiosity and delighted in the company of men of learning as became one who afterwards was President of the Royal Society. Naturally, having been himself successfully cut for the stone and ever afterwards piously keeping the anniversary, he was interested in things medical as he was in everything else, and he set down in unvarnished language?veiled sometimes in the published version of his Diary by asterisks?accounts of his own and his wife's ailments, not neglecting intimate details ; of the illnesses and medical histories of his relatives, friends and acquaintances ; and occasionally of the state of the public health, for he lived through the Great Plague of 1665.

MR. PEPYS.

The medical matters of prime interest in the Diary are those relating to Mr. and Mrs. Pepys, and were long ago dealt with (d'Arcy Power, 1895, 1904, 1911), in the light of material then available. d'Arcy Power consulted Wheatley, the editor of the best edition of the Diary, and received some information about the suppressed passages. Lately (Bryant, 1935) we have a further account by Pepys in the form of a general survey of his life's ailments and the state of his health in his 45tli year, not previously published, in which he describes his eye trouble, his lithiasis, naso-pharyngeal catarrh, wind-colic and what Bryant calls ' scurvy, which manifested itself in shortness of breath, constant pain in ' the legs and joints, swellings of the thighs in wet weather and retching ' and spitting and loss of voice.' Pepys says he cannot remember his life without pain from the stone in his kidneys, with haematuria, until he was about 20 years old, when after drinking copiously of water on a hot summer's day in Cambridge, he had some days' pain and sensibly felt the stone move down the ureter into his bladder. This confirms d'Arcy Power's surmise that the stone in ' the bladder was of renal origin. Thereafter Pepys had many fits of stone ' in the bladder until in his 26th year, three years after his marriage, he had it successfully removed by Mr. Hollier (Hollyard), surgeon at St. Thomas's. Pithiasis ran in the family, for the Diary records his mother, ' in greater and greater pain from the stone,' his aunt at Brampton voiding a great stone, and his brother starting like he did with great pain and haematuria. lithotomy must have been a desperate under- taking in those days, though cutting for the stone dates back to classical times. No doubt the operators were very quick. Indeed Cheselden, who perfected the operation of lateral lithotomy some few years after Pepys' death, could extract a stone in under a minute. But the mortality must have been high, and men would no doubt postpone the operation until the stone was large and the discomfort unbearable. 214 GLASGOW MEDICAL JOURNAL

Pepys probably had no soporific or narcotic draught by way of anaesthetic, for although niandragora or concoctions like Shakespeare's ' ' drowsy syrups were used by mediaeval surgeons, they were apparently unknown in Pare's time, and the use of them was discontinued in the seventeenth century. MacLaurin (1923) draws an effective picture of Mr. Pepys trussed with a rope in the lithotomy position and pretty Mrs. Pepys?then only about eighteen? trembling outside the door, horrified by her husband's yells. Perhaps it was like that, but Pepys got over it and apparently without much shock, for in his post-operative draught there was no musk, which, says d'Arcy Power, was the sovereign remedy for shock in those days. Mr. Hollier, according to , removed a stone as large as a tennis ball. He was a master of the art. Bryant says he cut thirty for the stone that year and all lived : but soon after, four died. Pepys' stone must have had the usual uric acid nucleus and laminae of urates. He was very proud of it and treasured it. In 1664 he ' had a case made for it which cost him twenty-four shillings, a great deal of money,' as he remarks. He was known to exhibit it to other sufferers who were allowed to take its dimensions, no doubt while Pepys, with much relish, was urging them to have the job done and get it over. Pepys was rewarded for his pluck, for he lived to be about 70, and it seems doubtful whether he ever, but once, suffered from typical renal colic, although a nest of seven stones was found in his left kidney post mortem. He seems never to have had haematuria after his operation, but he passed two small stones on 7th March, 1664-5 after much pain. He does record, however, several atypical attacks of pain with dysuria, at least once accompanied by fever and vomiting, and ever after his operation he was subject to recurrent transient attacks of epididymo-orchitis, sometimes even if he crossed his legs too quickly. His attacks of pain were usually accompanied by inability to void flatus and by constipation. Some of these seizures were rather like ileus, possibly due to reflex irritation caused by the stones in his kidney. Pepys resorted to enemata or clysters, as he calls them. One of his favourites consisted of small beer. As is usual, he attributed his illnesses to catching cold, too much wine, sitting in a draught, leaving off his periwig, etc. Judging by the amount of work he was able to get through before his retirement in 1089, and the difficulties he overcame, his health must have remained tolerable, but in 1(394 he told Evelyn that he was a good deal out of order, and a few years later he had a serious illness when his friends thought they were going to lose him. But he recovered and went to for his health. In the winter of 1699-1700 he had a return of his old trouble the stone, and gradually became more or less incapacitated until his death in 1703. Although Pepys seems to have got over his operation well, he suffered from sequelae. He had no children, and his sterility is attributed (by d'Arcy Power) to damage to his ejaculatory ducts. His recurrent orchitis PEPYS' DIARY?CARTER 215 was doubtless due to some permanent injury. None the less, his wife several times thought she was pregnant, as did, on one occasion, one of his light o' loves, much to Pepys' alarm. Pepys' frequent erotic adventures have been attributed to stimulation by his scarred perineum as well as to his addiction to wine, but probably his habits only differed from those of the man about town of the period in that he put them on record. Indeed his amours seem to have usually stopped half-way and been rather half-hearted on the whole. He avoided the regular hetairae, sticking more or less to respectable women of a lower social class, which is probably the reason why he escaped venereal disease, to which there are many allusions in the Diarv. Apart from stone, Pepys's great trouble was his eyesight, failure of which caused him to close his Diary on 31st May, 1669, when still a young man, and so deprive the world of his own inimitable record of his later life as he climbed to become one of England's greatest public servants ' and the Saviour of the Navy.' He first alludes to his eye-trouble on 19th January, 1663-4, complaining of pain and failure of sight which he imputes to sitting late reading and writing by candlelight. Towards the end of this year he feels that something should be done and consults Mr. Cocker (the writing-master), who discourses about writing and ability ' of sight and how I shall do to get some glasse or other to help my eyes by candlelight.' Cocker was the famous Edward Cocker of Cocker's ' Arithmetic,' published in 1664, which ran into many editions and gave ' rise to the phrase, still occasionally heard, according to Cocker.' Cocker ' sold Pepys a globe of glass,' but it was of little use. In May, 1666, the ' diarist records My right eye sore and full of humour of late, I think by my late change of my brewer and having of eight shilling beer.' He had trouble this winter in entering up his journal, and ten days before Christmas we find him thinking of green spectacles which he buys 011 Christmas Eve by the advice of Lord Bruncker. However, on New Year's ' Eve, his eyes are still sore by candlelight, and not else.' Next year, by late summer, he records his eyes getting worse and worse and complains of much pain. Late in 1667 he bought spectacles from Turlington, the ' ' optician, who advised very young sights ; that is, presumably, concave ' lenses. He is dissuaded from using old spectacles,' and told not to use glasses that magnify much. He probably got quite the wrong sort. So poor Pepys goes on with sore, smarting, watery eyes, red-rimmed and sticky in the mornings, after his evening's work by flickering candle- light. In 1668 Dr. Turberville gives him physic and something to drop in ' his eyes, and in July he is bled towards curing my eves.' Later this year ' he thought he got temporary relief by using tube spectacalls of paper,' of which he had heard at the Royal Society . He buys a reading glass and reads with his paper tube without pain. But he is soon complaining again ' and gets a more elaborate apparatus comprising a vi/.ard with a tube 21(5 GLASGOW MEDICAL JOURNAL

fastened within both eyes, which with .... a glass in the tube, do content nie mightily.' But a fortnight after this he changed his place in the office, unable to bear the strong light from the windows in his eyes. What was wrong with Pepys' eyes ? Gordon Davidson of Sydney thought he had irido-cyclitis, the result of some toxaemia (McLaurin, 1923). Maclyaurin himself suggests hypermetropia and early presbyopia. d'Arcy Power (1911) diagnosed hypermetropia and astigmatism, which sounds very probable, as anyone who has had to do with this combination will know. Perhaps there was disturbed ocular muscle equilibrium also. Pepys may have got glasses which corrected his hypermetropia, but as ' astigmatism was not recognised until Thomas Young, the father of physiologic optics,' described it in 1801, he could hardly have got relief unless he, or his friends at the Royal Society, had stumbled on some ' ' means of modifying his tubes so that he could look through a slit or a small enough hole. Probably he had little astigmatism, but enough to cause persistent irritation when close work was attempted. Evidently his eyes continued to trouble him, for he fell to employing clerks for all ' writing, save 011 occasions of great importance.' In the account of his health written in 1677 (Bryant, 1935), he says he can see as well as ever distant objects. He seems to think that his naso-pharvngeil catarrh also caused pain in his head and eyes, especially in the mornings until he had ' ' drained my head by spitting and blown his nose well. But it is clear that if he refrained from using his eyes for close work or intent observation in poor light, he got along very well and he was in no danger of the blind- ness he had sometimes feared. To be sure, iridio-cyclitis?if he ever had it?may lead to glaucoma, but Pepys did not get this. Pepys suffered from various minor ailments from time to time. On 22nd May, 1060, when with the fleet which went over to Holland to bring back the restored King (Charles II), he fired a gun himself in salute, and ' getting his head too near the piece injured his right eye. It was very red ' and ill next morning, but evidently cleared up quickly, for he does not mention it again. He probably had herpes occasionally, for 011 9th ' January, 1003-4, he records his underlip being mightily swelled, I know ' not why but over-rubbing, it itching ; and on 20th September, 1004, he says his mouth was scabby. He put on a black patch for a day or two. He was very susceptible to colds and several times notes that his palate had fallen down, once due to sitting in a draught at the playhouse. Once ' ' he caught a mighty cold accompanied by much pain in his right ear and palate. Other catarrhal attacks he attributes to having his hair cut, leaving off his periwig, or flinging off his hat at dinner and sitting with the wind on his neck. Early in 1600 he has a boil under his chin and something like stomatitis, for which he used alum. He thought he had cancer of the mouth and consulted Mr. Fage, who gave him something for it. He went to Epsom in 1003 and drank the waters. Too much purgation and riding PEPYS' DIARY?CANTER 217

' evidently caused a haemorrhoid, about the bigness of the bag of a silk- worm.' He had had one before but this time thought it might be a rupture, so determined to consult Mr. Hollier about it.

' Several times he had urticaria ; twice in February, 1662-3 ; all my body inflamed and my face in a sad redness and swelling and pimpled.' He had pains in his stomach with it. The apothecary advises him to ' sweat soundly. Pepys thought it might be due to quantities of Dantzic- ' girkins that he had eaten, but at first he thought a louse or two might have bitten him. Lousiness was common in Pepys' day. He records that ' his wife one day picked many off him, large and small,' when he was itching. Once he sends his periwig to the barber to be cleansed of nits.

MRS. PEPYS. Mrs. Pepys' ailments naturally require a good many dots in the printed version of the Diary. There is little need for them in these days. She certainly suffered from dysmenorrhoea, which regularly rendered her unfit for housework and was severe enough to cause her to stay in bed. As the Diary proceeds she seems to suffer less or else Pepys fails to record lier pains so often. In the early years of the Diary, Mrs. Pepys is often supplied with pills and plaster by Dr. Williams of . The plasters were evidently for some septic condition she suffered from, for in ' May, 1661, her swelling broke and she was in great ease presently.' ' Pepys put a vent supplied by Dr. Williams into the hole to keep it open,' obviously to facilitate drainage. On Midsummer Day this year, Dr. ' Williams again is come in to see my wife, whose soare belly is now grown dangerous, as she thinks.' Possibly this septic condition, whatever it was?vulvar abscess has been suggested?never cleared up and was the cause of the fistula from which she seems to have suffered later. There is nothing in the Diary to suggest that she was infected by her husband. I?ate in 1663 she is seen by Pepys' surgeon, Mr Hollier, to advise about ' her hollow sore place.' A few days later he calls again and decides that ' what used to swell up there did in breaking leave a hollow which has since gone in further and further until now it is near three inches deep .... but keeps to the outside of the skin, and so he must be forced to cut it open all along.' This troubled Pepys very much ; he couldn't bear to think of his wife being cut. However, Mr. Hollier on second thoughts decided that fomentations might be sufficient and that treatment could be carried ' out by her mayd .... without knowing directly what it is for, but only that it may be for the piles.' Obviously a somewhat embarrassing complaint. d'Arcy Power conjectured an ischio-rectal abscess pointing rather far forward, culminating in a fistula. It is not clear whether it ever healed soundly, but shortly after Christmas, 1663, Pepys paid ' Mr, Hollier three pounds for his physic and work to my wife .... but 218 GLASGOW MEDICAL JOURNAL whether it is cured or no I cannot tell, but he says it will never come to anything though it may ooze now and then a little.' In 1664, on 6th June, Mrs. Pepvs had an illness which might have been ' dysentery or -poisoning, from some cold she got to-day, or from something else.' She had the usual symptoms, abdominal pain, vomiting and diarrhoea, lasting about three days. She had bad teeth and often suffered from toothache, and gumboils ; ' once an abscess which burst in her mouth thus not spoiling her face.' She had earache once from impacted wax, which was removed. In September, 1663, when they were away from home at Buntingford, Mrs. Pepys was taken ill after drinking cold beer. She was sick and became so pale that Pepys was frightened. However, she was revived ' ' with strong water and put to bed. Later Pepys and his company supped at her bed-side. In September, 1666, Pepys was troubled at his wife's hair falling out. There was no wonder perhaps : she had a lot to put up with, had lived through the anxieties of the plague, and now the Great Fire was upon them, and Pepys was moving his valuables. Once Mrs. Pepys had a black eye which Samuel gave her. But he was ' vexed at my heart to think what I had done,' and they were soon friends ' again, although she was forced to lay poultices or something to her eye all day.' The Diary records no serious illness suffered by Mrs. Pepys. Soon after its close Pepys got leave of absence and they set out together on a long tour of France and Holland, which journey Pepys afterwards ' described as full of health and content,' but Mrs. Pepys picked up some infection before they left Brussels and, although able to travel, developed a fever, rapidly became seriously ill and three weeks after their return she died, 10th November, 1669. d'Arcy Power suggests she died of typhoid fever : Mael?aurin suggests that as she probably had chronic oral sepsis and pyorrhoea, she may have died of septic pneumonia. Also the illness may have been typhus. Speculation is futile on the information available. She was only 29, and Pepys was to miss her.

VENEREAL DISEASE.

There are many allusions to venereal disease in the Diary, but although gonorrhoea is probably mentioned in Leviticus and much had been written and talked about syphilis since the siege of Naples in 1495, it is often not very clear to which disease Pepys is referring when he uses the vulgar colloquial terms still in use. In 1661 he notes that Mr. Pickering ' tells him plainly of the vices of the Court and how the pox is so common there , , , , as common as eating or swearing.' In 1667, L,acy the actor? PEPYS' DIARY?CARTER 219

a ' favourite comedian and a playwright himself?is reported as a-dying ?f the pox .... nor would receive any ghostly advice from a Bishop.' Actually Lacy lived another 14 years. In 1664 Sir John Minnes who was a vice-admiral, and a coxcomb, according to Pepvs, boasts of his curing the disease in Sir J. Denham when it was come to an ulcer all over his face.' Evidently Sir John was as handy as most sailors are. Prince Rupert?of the Rhine?who fought for Charles I at Edgehill a?d elsewhere, became a Mediterranean pirate whose privateers were chased by Blake, and ended up at the Board of Trade, was Pepys' star case. In January 1664-5, Pepys is told that Rupert is ill and that his ' disease is the pox, and that he must be fluxed, telling the horrible degree ?f the disease upon him with its breaking out on his head.' Two years ' later Rupert is reported very ill and so bad that he do now yield to be ' trepanned, for the disease hath eaten to his head and come through his scull so that his scull must be opened.' A week later Pepys hears of work done by Moulins the surgeon (James Moleyns or Mullins, surgeon to St. Thomas's Hospital, and joint with Mr. Hollier for cutting for the stone). ' Rupert must have had gummata of his skull bones, for having cut the outward table as they call it, they find the inner all corrupted, so as it comes out without any force.' The surgeon was afraid that the whole inside of his head might be corrupted, but apparently the remainder .of the cranial cavity was cut off by adhesions. Rupert seemed much better after this removal of necrotic bone, for Pepys saw him at Court two months ' later looking well, but something appears to be under his periwigg on the crown of his head.' However his doctors treated him later, he lived until 1682, an active member of the Board of Trade and a connoisseur of mezzotints. Even Pepys' own family was not exempt from suspicion, for when his brother Tom lay dying (possibly of phthisis), his first attendant, Mr. Powell, clearly suggested that syphilis might be at the root of the trouble ?n the strength of a somewhat mythical ulcer in the mouth. So Dr. Wiverly was called as a second opinion and found 110 sign of an ulcer. Pepys was very angry, and with Dr. Wiverley searched poor Tom for signs ?f the disease and found none. Tom also denied infection. Mr. Powell was dismissed summarily despite his explanations, and Dr. Wiverley got the fee. Tom got a clean bill as regards syphilis, but his clearance certificate would not have satisfied modern immunologists. Among Pepys' memoranda of his voyage to in 1083 are ' comments on the vice in the whole place of all sorts,' and 011 the Governor's boasting of the wench who at 16 had given her disease to 110 less than 400 of his soldiers (Bryant, 1938), and was much amused because ' his own secretary had got it most pocklv.' Rolleston (1943) calls this gonorrhoea, 220 GLASGOW MEDICAL JOURNAL

The very comprehensive index to the Diary provides clues to many other references to venereal disease, its homes, haunts and effects in Pepys' day. Most of them are quoted by Rolleston.

rLAGUE. Bubonic plague came to town, it is said, in the early hot June days of 1665 and first showed itself in a house in I,ongacre. Celestial portents, a comet, flaming swords in the heavens and malignant conjunctions of the planets, heralded its approach. Actually it was more or less endemic in the 17th century and its development into epidemic form was slow, but it spread extremely rapidly from June onwards. It had lately raged in Holland. While not sweeping Europe in the seventeenth Century as the did in the fourteenth, it struck urban populations heavily : Milan 1630, Vienna 1679, Prague 1681. In alone, in 1665, it killed in five months over 69,000, probably one in five or six of the population. On 7th June, 1665, Pepys saw in Drury Lane two or three houses ' " marked with a red cross upon the doors, and Lord have mercy upon " ' us writ there.' This put him into an ill conception of myself and my smell, so I was forced to buy some roll tobacco to smell to and chaw, which took away the apprehension.' There is no evidence that Pepys ever smoked, though he mentions tobacco on other occasions. A few days later he notes that Dr. Alexander Burnett, who had once prescribed for his kidney trouble, has plague in his house in Fenchurch Street. On 25th August Pepys learns that Dr. Burnett himself is dead of plague after his house had been open again for a month following the death of his man. Burnett is said to have fallen a victim of his own zeal,' ' being infected while helping to examine a body full of the tokens.' ' ' ' writes of plague spots or tokens as really gangreen spots or mortified flesh in small knobs as broad as a little silver penny and hard as a piece of Callous or Horn,' but Defoe had no adult memory of the plague year. They must have been cutaneous haemorrhages, furuncles, pustules or the characteristic buboes ; probably petechiae, according to Osier. Pepys records the increase in mortality from the plague. The number of deaths rose week by week until 19th September, when the total due to plague was 7,165 out of 8,297. After this there was a gradual fall with one or two temporary rises until 12th December, when there were only 243 deaths in the week. ' On 29th June Pepys notices the Court preparing to go out of towne.' On 27th July the decided to sit at , but Pepys thought the decision premature. He made his will and stayed in London until the Navy Office removed to . Lady Carteret gave him a bottle of Plague water. Later Pepys wrote her in a letter on 14th September a series of vivid thumb-nail sketches of life in London at that PEPYS' DIARY?CARTER 221

' tune : the nights though much lengthened, are grown too short to conceal the burials of those that died the day before, people being constrained to borrow daylight for that service.' He stayed in the City until the dead ' amounted to 6,000 a week, and little noise heard day or night but tolling ' ' of bells ; he stayed until he could walk up Lombard Street and not meet 20 persons from one end to the other : till whole families 10 and 12 together have been swept away .... my brewer's house shut up and my baker with his whole family, dead of the Plague.' He had a lot of moral courage, though he did not like noises in the night and ghost stories scared him. The plague stopped his going to the play for the playhouses were mostly closed. His account of the plague is not detailed like that of the journalist Defoe, but it is first hand, and he paints unforgettable pictures. We get a glimpse of a citizen stumbling over the corpse of a man dead of plague. He conveys an atmosphere of gloom and horror thick with emblems of mortality. One day curiosity gets the better of fear and he ' went forth and walked towards Moorfields to see (God forbid my presumption) whether I could see any dead corps going to the grave.' ' ' He allowed himself a cup of good drink during plague time, but alas, this was noticed by envious men and did his reputation no good. He noticed the overfilled graveyards, and when he attended his parish church, St. Olave's, in January, 1666, he shivered as he saw the many heaped mounds of recently turned earth in the churchyard, and reflected how many had been buried in and about his church. Of the , which marked the end of widespread outbreaks in England, Pepvs makes it quite clear in his day to day entries that although the miasma of pestilence hung everywhere and life was very precarious, everyday affairs went on, though in a limited fashion. The ' ' City was not paralysed as Defoe in his Journal of the Plague Year would seem to imply. Pepys seems on the whole to have been more concerned during the Great Fire, when he might very well have lost his property. During the plague, although he was undoubtedly apprehensive, he kept his feet on the ground and carried on. Nor did the increasing sickness damp his curiosity or his pleasure in existence. At the end of the ' year, 31st December, 1665, he writes, I have never lived so merrily (besides that I never got so much) as I have done this plague time.' Although he probably often whistled to keep up his spirits, he did not let ' his imagination run away with him. He even contrived to be very ' merry on occasion at funerals.

MISCELLANEA.

' ' Pepys described himself oddly as being with child to see any new or strange thing, and it is his insatiable curiosity that makes the Diary what it is. No one ever took notes so assiduously, though whether he ever expected them to be printed cannot now be known. 222 GLASGOW MEDICAL JOURNAL

Smallpox was epidemic in England in 1666-75. It is frequently ' mentioned in Evelyn's Diary. Pepys notices that L,ady Richmond, who is of a noble person as ever I saw, but her face worse than it was consider- ably by the smallpox.' ' On 11th November, 1664, he notes of one of his maids, my little girl Susan is fallen sicke of the meazles or at least of a Scarlett feavour.' As ' she was better in a few days, maybe it was urticaria or just a stomach rash.' Scarlet fever had been differentiated, or rather described, before Pepys' time, but it was not generally known until Sydenham described it in 1676 and distinguished it from measles. ' On 25th July, 1664, he writes, thence to my barber Gervas who this day buries his child, which it seems was born without a passage behind.' The baby was a week or a fortnight old, he says. Obviously a case of congenital malformation of the hind gut and imperforate anus. He is interested in a new disease of which Sir R. Slingsbv has fallen a ' victim, an ague and fever.' Wheatley refers to a book by Whitman ' (1659) on Febris Anomala, or the New Disease that now rageth throughout England.' Could this have been our old enemy Influenza? On 19th vSeptember, 1664, he hears with interest of Dr. Frazier, a favourite of the King, very popular about the Court in curing certain ' diseases and helping the ladies to slip their calfes when there is occasion.' One can imagine that the abortionist's art might have had its place at Charles II's Court. Oil 1 Ltli November, 1064, he hears of the birth of a monster at ' Salisbury. Two women children perfectly made, joined together at the lower part of their bellies, and every part perfect as two bodies, and only one payre of legs coming forth on one side from the middle where they ' ' ' wrere joyned.' These Siamese twins lived 24 hours, but being showed too much to people, was killed.' In 1668, when on his way to the Duke's ' ' playhouse to see he saw the bearded woman from Augsburg, ' with a beard as much as any man I ever saw, black almost and grizly.' ' It was a strange sight, he confessed, and pleased me mightily.' This woman was exhibited in Ratcliffe Highway. Pepvs was interested in the habits of living creatures and records the ' snakes in Lancashire which catch larks when they are soared to the highest' by placing themselves underneath and ejecting poison up to the ' bird, so the bird do suddenly come down again .... and falls directly into the mouth of the serpent.' After this Pepys had no difficulty in believing the story (a traveller's tale) of the fiddlers who go about the harvest fields waiting to be hired by those stung by tarantulas, when, one supposes, they would whirl hysterically into the tarantella. At the Royal Society (and Pepys attended its scientific meetings frequently though there are few references to him in its records), in PEPYS' DIARY?CARTER 223

' November, 1666, he saw a transfusion experiment, a pretty experiment of the blood of a (logg let out, till he died, into the body of another on one side, while all his own run out on the other side.' The first died but the ' other very well and likely to do well.' They wondered what would be the effect if the blood of a Quaker was let into an Archbishop, but Dr. Croone (the original Croone of the Croonian lectures) thought it may be of use to man's health '.for the amending of bad blood by borrowing from a better body.' Next year he records that the college had hired a man to have some sheep's blood let into his body. It was proposed to let in about 12 ounces, and apparently it was done and the man was no worse. Indeed he said he felt better for it, though Pepys wrote him down as being ' cracked a little in his head.'

' In May, 1665, he saw a cat killed with the oyle of tobacco,' and saw, as Calverley put it,

' How one (or two at most) Drops make a cat a ghost?- Useless except to roast?- Doctors have said it,' and having seen the cat's goose cooked by tobacco juice, he proceeded to ' ' admire an abortive child preserved fresh in spirits of salt : perhaps one of Dr. Frazier's perquisites. One day he experimented with an ear trumpet ' to his great content.' For Pepys any curiosity had fascination, and the more monstrous it ' was the more he was thrilled : why negros drowned look white and lose ' ' their blackness ; a bird from the East Indies which talks many things ' ' and neyes like a horse ; a baboon which already understands much Knglish.' Soon after the cessation of the plague he attended a meeting of the Royal .Society to hear a lecture on Respiration by Sir George Knt ' (who attributed plague to minute invisible insects), and concluded that it is not to this day known, or concluded on among physicians, nor to be done either, how the action is managed by nature, or for what use it is.' Harvey, before this, had shown how blood is changed in the lungs from venous to arterial, but the how and why of breathing had not been solved.

As President of the Royal .Society, Pepys licensed the publication by the .Society of Newton's Principici. To the end of his life this extraordinary man who, by his unconscious revelations, left us such an intimate picture of himself and his times, ' remained a very worthy industrious and curious person .... learned in many things, a very great cherisher of learned men of whom he had the conversation ; none exceeding him in knowledge of the Navy.' So John J^velvn on the day of Pepys' death, 224 GLASGOW MEDICAL JOURNAL

These then are some of the matters of medical interest of his life and times revealed by the genial diarist who surely must have many a time put down almost every thought that came into his head. Pepvs' Diary is unique : but so was the man. His style is perfect for his purpose, and here and there he has his purple patches, as in his account of his first sight of the Great Fire, which is most impressive, when he achieves a style full of dignity and little short of great literary distinction. Many of the medical features of the work are of more interest to the student of human nature as instances of self-revelation, of extraordinary candour about most private matters, and of the perennial human interest in disease, than they are informative to the student of medicine or medical history. But Pepys' pains and Mrs. Pepys' black eye and the lechery at Court and the Plague and all the rest are part of what is to be seen from the windows that Pepys opens in his long gossipy chronicle, through which one can look on the life of the times by day or night and be entertained : and it is all enormously attractive. Through these Pepysian casements are to be caught marvellous glimpses of events and circumstances, of trivialities and tribulations, of special interest to the doctor whose study of mankind is man, in their relationship to the torrent of life that floods through the years, the extraordinarily interesting years, in which Pepys lived and looked and listened?and wrote.

REFERENCES. Bryant, Arthur (1933). Samuel Pepys : the Man in the Making. Cambridge Univ. Press. Bryant, Arthur (1935). Samuel Pepys : the Years of Peril. Cambridge Univ. Press. Bryant, Arthur (1938). Samuel Pepys : the Saviour of the Navy. Cambridge Univ. Press. MacLaurin, C. (1923). Post Mortem. London : Cape. Power, d'Arcy (1895). Lancet. 1 : 1357. Power, d'Arcy (1904). Lancet. 1 : 1071. Power, d'Arcy (1911). Lancet. 1 : 1687. Rolleston, J. D. (1943). Brit. J. Ven. Dis. 4 : 169. Wheatley, H. B. (Edit.) (1946). The Diary of Samuel Pepys. London : Bell.