In the Supplement to his Lexicon Technicum (1744), Dr John Harris traces the history of rope-dancing. He quotes Capitolinus as saying that the Emperor Marcus Aurelius had such regard for rope dancers that he ordered quilts to be laid under them to prevent injury. In Defoe’s day funambulists (as they were sometimes called, following the Latin form of the word) often exhibited at fairs. They are satirized in The Spectator, nos. 28 and 141.

second Nineveh: Jonah 3: 5–10.

Plague-Water: the College of Physicians had recommended a plague-water in 1665 which, according to Hodges, had been used with some success. He printed the formula for it (Loimologia, 173–4). Lady Carteret gave Pepys a bottle of plague-water on 20 July 1665. Some of these ‘infallible’ remedies were advertised in L’Estrange’s Newes and Intelligencer. A ‘Universal Elixer’ was advertised in The Newes, 22 July 1665 (see Walter G. Bell, The Great Plague in London, 1665 (rev. edn., 1951), 96 ff., for a number of these remedies). Royal antidotes found favour. The College of Physicians recommended ‘The King’s Majesty’s excellent Receipt for the Plague’ and ‘A Drink for the Plague prepared by the Lord Bacon and approved by Queen Elizabeth’. See Necessary Directions … by the College of Physicians, reprinted in A Collection of Very Valuable and Scarce Pieces, 51.

poisoned … with Mercury: in Several Choice Histories … of the Plague (1666) (extracts from Isbrandus Diemerbroeck’s Tractatus de Peste, in Defoe’s library in the edition of 1665), ‘The Eleventh Famous History’ relates the ‘deadly mistake’ of ‘a certain Chyrurgion’ who died within three days after treating himself with mercury (pp. 21–2). Hodges mentions an amulet used ‘by our own Country People’: ‘a Walnut filled with Mercury’ (Loimologia, 220).

Dr. Brooks … Dr. Berwick: of the four medical men mentioned by H.F., the most interesting so far as Defoe is concerned is Dr Nathaniel Hodges (1627–88), ‘the eminent physician’, whose Latin treatise on the plague is referred to in the Journal, 190. Hodges was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and at Christ Church, Oxford. He graduated MD in 1659 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1672, a year after his Loimologia was published. It was translated in 1720 by Dr John Quincy. He was one of several physicians appointed by the Corporation to minister to the poor during the plague. Defoe’s Dr Brooks was probably Humphrey Brooke (1617–93), educated at St John’s College, Cambridge, and elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1674. He was the author of a medical work, A Conservatory of Health (1650), and The Durable Legacy (1681), some moral and religious directions addressed to his children. Peter Berwick, or Barwick (1619–1705), was physician-in-ordinary to Charles II. Well known for his skill in treating smallpox and fevers, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1655. Like Hodges, he was appointed by the Corporation to care for the ill in several parishes (London, Guildhall Repertory, 70 (1664–5), fos. 150b, 151a, 152a). Nathaniel Upton, whose medical qualifications are unknown, was master of the City pest-house in 1665.

Amulets: widely recommended and widely disapproved in the seventeenth century, they had the authority of Ambrose Paré (‘a sachet of some poison over the heart’) and Van Helmont, whose use of a toad for the purpose was respectfully mentioned and imitated. A striking instance is found in Thomson’s Loitomia, which relates his personal experience with Van Helmont’s amulet on discovering symptoms of the plague in himself: ‘I am sufficiently persuaded, That the adjunction of this Bufo [toad] nigh my Stomach, was of wonderful force to master and tame this Venom then domineering in me’ (pp.