Up there in the annals of disaster with the Great Fire and the Blitz, the Great Plague peaked in September 1665 – by then, it was killing 1,000 Londoners a day. To commemorate the disease’s 350th anniversary, the Royal College of Physicians are running a combined museum tour and history walk that will explain the many epidemics, maladies and contagions that have afflicted the city, heading back further than 1665 – and forward to consider the effects of cutting-edge RCP research into modern-day epidemic diseases like Ebola.
You’ll get to see 17th-century pomanders and pictures of quack doctors in the museum, as well as hearing about every possible affliction, from alcoholism to zoonoses, via tuberculosis, yellow fever and AIDS, with ‘plagues’ of idleness, criminality and ignorance considered too.