In the last weeks of 1623 London was in the throes of one of those infectious disease outbreaks characteristic of the era. A “spotted fever,” most likely typhus, was cutting a swath through the city’s tightly packed neighborhoods, and in late November it laid low England’s most famous preacher. John Donne was fifty-one years old, and dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, though he had come late to holy orders. In his early days, as a womanizing gallant, he had authored the most scandalous and original love poetry of the era. Life, though, had transformed the young scapegrace and reordered his concerns. Marriage had brought poverty and a dozen children, a tragic number of whom failed to outlive their infancy. Finally, Anne Donne died following the stillbirth of their twelfth. It had been but a few years since Donne had found a measure of material comfort and prominence; now it was slipping away into pain, fear, and indignity. He lay racked by fever, chills, palpitations, and delirium, assisted, if we can call it that, by physicians who purged and bled his already weak body and, in a gesture that seems absurd even for early modern medicos, laid dead pigeons at his feet in the hopes of “drawing the vapours from the head.”
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