Batavia's Graveyard (4 page)

In the rare cases where some sort of physical intervention became
necessary—and, given the contemporary ignorance of anesthesia and antiseptics, this
was always a last resort—a surgeon would be called. Surgeons ranked below both the
physicians and the apothecaries in the trinity, and it was their duty to set bones, trepan
skulls, lance boils, and deal with the more unpleasant and contagious ailments that were
rife at the time. The treatment of venereal disease, done with solutions of mercury, was
within the province of the surgeons. It also fell to them to treat the plague-stricken,
since physicians generally shied away from the most virulent epidemics.

It was, however, far more common for a consultation with a physician to result in
a referral to an apothecary. Contemporary medical opinion held that virtually all ailments
could be traced to disturbances in the balance of the four humors that were thought to
exist within the body, or mismanagement of the six “nonnaturals” that maintained
good health or provoked disease. Apothecaries existed to prepare treatments designed to
remedy such imbalances and manage the nonnaturals. If they did their job correctly, the
full recovery of the patient was—at least in theory—guaranteed.

In the dingy recesses of an apothecary’s shop lurked pots and pillboxes by
the hundred—each containing one of the many hundreds of ingredients required to make
the incredibly complex preparations of the day. Most drugs were concocted from parts of
several different plants, always with an addition of animal products and sometimes with
the admixture of metals. Roots and herbs were the principal ingredients, but apothecaries
were also required to be familiar with considerably more exotic ingredients. Unicorn horn
was greatly sought after. Excrement was widely prescribed—pigeon droppings were a
cure for epilepsy, and horse manure was effective against pleurisy—and the sex organs
of wild animals were held to be particularly efficacious. Dried wild boar penis, for
example, was thought to reduce phlegm.

To modern eyes, at least, the most unusual ingredient in any apothecary’s
store was “mummy,” ground human flesh taken (at least in theory) directly from
plundered Egyptian tombs. It was a popular cure-all, supposedly effective against almost
every ailment from headaches to bubonic plague. The best mummy had a “resinous,
harden’d, black shining surface,” an acrid taste, and a fragrant smell. When
supplies from Egypt were hard to get, which they usually were, European bodies might be
substituted, but it was important that the corpse from which the flesh was taken had not
succumbed to disease. Although the very finest mummy was supposed to come from the remains
of men suffocated in a Saharan sandstorm, therefore, in practice the principal source was
the bodies of executed criminals.

With one significant exception, the other ingredients an apothecary required were
not so hard to find. Animal products could be had from butchers or specialist traveling
salesmen. Pharmacists usually obtained the plants themselves, cultivating physic gardens
or wandering the countryside in search of rare roots. The most important thing was that
ingredients were fresh; almost every paste and potion had to be specially prepared on the
day it was required, and the principal tool of the apothecary’s trade was his mortar
and pestle.

The one drug no apothecary prepared on his own behalf was theriac,
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the main
antidote to venoms of all sorts. It was used to treat snakebite and rabies and taken as a
cure for poison, though it was most commonly prescribed to strengthen a patient who had
been bled, sweated, and purged and whose condition was, nevertheless, deteriorating.
Theriacs—there were several of them in existence—were particularly complex and
potent medicines, and so difficult to make that only the senior apothecaries of the
largest cities were trusted to prepare them. They contained up to 70 different ingredients
and were unusual in that their single most important constituent was animal: viper’s
flesh. The best theriac came from Venice and was known as “Venice treacle.”
Venetian pharmacists bred their own vipers and mixed their theriac in bulk once each year.
The concoction was exported by the Italian city-state throughout the rest of Europe, and
no apothecary of the time would have been without it.

Nevertheless, medicines were not a Dutch apothecary’s sole source of income.
They were members of the St. Nicholas Guild, which included the grocers and spicers, and
like them they had the right to sell fruit pies and ginger cakes. Many of the less
reputable stocked beer, sometimes dispensing it surreptitiously and free of the heavy
state taxes on alcohol. All of them made poisons, based on arsenic, which were used to
control the extraordinary quantities of vermin that infested every town. This part of a
pharmacist’s work was strictly controlled by the local council, but, even so, it
helped to give them a somewhat sinister reputation. When someone in a town died
unexpectedly, there were often mutterings of potions brewed in dark back rooms. In their
cluttered stores, the black-cloaked apothecaries merely smiled.

Jeronimus Cornelisz set up shop in Haarlem, probably some time between 1624 and
1627. His reasons for settling in the province of Holland, rather than Friesland, remain
unknown, but Haarlem was a much bigger and more cosmopolitan place than Bergum or
Leeuwarden. It was the second city of the wealthiest and most important of the United
Provinces and had a population of 40,000. It must have seemed a propitious place to
establish a new business.

Haarlem was a typical Dutch town, raucous and bustling, but neat and tidy to a
fault. It had sprung up a few miles inland from the coast, a little to the west of
Amsterdam and just north of the dark and storm-swept inland sea known as the
Haarlemmermeer. The whole city was girdled by a moat and a defensive wall, and the lazy
waters of the River Spaarne, which flowed through Haarlem on its way to the sea, cut it
into two unequal halves and brought in the ships that supplied many of its needs. Inside
the walls the red-roofed houses were mostly made of brick, and all the major streets had
been paved by the first years of the century. They were daily cleaned of rubbish and the
ordure that still rained down from upstairs windows—a refinement quite unheard-of
outside the Netherlands. All in all, Haarlem was a pleasant, busy place, less haphazard,
less chaotic, and less dangerous than the great towns of England, Italy, and
France.

The city had been built around eight main streets, all of which emerged into the
Great Market that was the focal point of urban life. It was one of the largest
marketplaces in the United Provinces and seethed with activity throughout the daylight
hours. Its centerpiece was the Grote Kerk of St. Bavo, which was the largest and, some
travelers reckoned, the most beautiful church in Holland, though it can hardly have been a
peaceful place to worship. A large covered fish market, fully 60 yards long, had been
tacked onto the north side of the church, while not 10 yards away, on the west side of the
square, stood the substantial bulk of the New Meat-Hall, where during the week the
contemplation of the devout would be disturbed by the unholy racket of cattle being
slaughtered.

Not all the city was so grand. Away from the main thoroughfares there were
warrens of little passageways and alleys where homes were smaller—just a room or
two—and the inhabitants much poorer. A whole quarter of Haarlem was given over to
cheap housing for the thousands of women who labored in the bleacheries that had made the
city famous, dyeing linen white in pits of buttermilk. There were other poorer areas
nearby, packed full of Protestant immigrants fleeing the horrors of the
Counter-Reformation. But, crowded as it was, Haarlem was a relatively wealthy place, and
the people who lived along the streets leading to the Great Market were the wealthiest of
all.

Cornelisz rented a house on one of these eight streets—the Grote Houtstraat,
or Great Wood Street, which led from the market south through the city, over the moat, and
into the wooded park that ran along the edge of the Haarlemmermeer. The young Frisian
opened up a pharmacy on the ground floor and lived above the shop. He had a maidservant
and a stuffed crocodile—which hung over the counter and was the principal symbol of
the apothecary—and he was popular with his neighbors. He was also accepted by the
city, becoming a full citizen, or
poorter,
of Haarlem at a time when such
privileges were never granted lightly. This rank brought with it many privileges,
including the right to vote.

Newcomer to Holland though he was, Jeronimus now seemed to be on the verge of
great success. He had become a master of one of the most prestigious professions in the
United Provinces. He was in business for himself, and his shop seemed ideally positioned
to attract a clientele from among the citizens of one of the wealthiest towns in the
Republic. In normal circumstances he could have looked forward to a life of prosperity, to
the deference of his fellow citizens, perhaps even to a civic career and, eventually, a
position on the town council. But the circumstances were far from normal. For Jeronimus
Cornelisz, the future held nothing but disease, disgrace, and death.

The first blow fell in the winter of 1627. At some point in the middle 1620s, the
apothecary had acquired a spouse. We know almost nothing of Belijtgen Jacobsdr, who
appears in the town records as the “lawful housewife” of Jeronimus Cornelisz,
not even whether she was Frisian or Dutch. She was probably a number of years younger than
her husband was and, like him, of a good family that was not quite in the uppermost strata
of Netherlands society. It is not unlikely that she was herself an apothecary’s
daughter, since pharmacists tended to marry among themselves, and she certainly assisted
her husband in his shop. If she was typical of the middle-class Dutch women of the day,
Belijtgen would have been clever, somewhat educated, very capable, and not at all
dominated by her husband. Foreign visitors generally lauded the women of the United
Provinces as extremely pretty, contemporary tastes running to rosy-skinned and plump young
wives and one Dutchman writing admiringly of girls who “could fill a barrel with
buttocks, and a tub with breasts.” Jeronimus’s wife may have been all these
things. But by December 1627 she was also seriously ill.

Some time in November, Belijtgen had given birth to a baby boy. The pregnancy had
not gone well, and Belijtgen had been unable to leave her bed for several weeks before the
birth. In her eighth month she had been so ill she had thought she was going to die and
had even summoned a solicitor to her bedside to dictate a will that named Jeronimus as her
“universal heir.” But, in the end, she carried her baby for the full term and
the boy was delivered safely. Several neighbors testified that he was a lusty child, free
from blemishes and illness.

Belijtgen, on the other hand, suffered agonies after the birth. The midwife she
had hired, an Amsterdam woman named Cathalijntgen van Wijmen, turned out to be uncouth,
deranged, and dangerously incompetent. During her stay in Haarlem, Cathalijntgen danced
and sang compulsively, confessed to suffering from “torments inside her head,”
and slept with an ax beside her bed. During Belijtgen’s labor, she left part of the
placenta in the new mother’s womb. The decaying afterbirth became infected, and
Cornelisz’s wife contracted puerperal fever as a result.

This illness was a serious matter. In the seventeenth century, puerperal fever
was frequently a lethal condition, and it made it impossible for Belijtgen to care for her
son. Dutch infants of all classes were generally breast-fed by their mothers; it was
universally agreed to be the best way to safeguard an infant’s health, and wet nurses
were seldom employed in the United Provinces unless the mother was physically incapable of
producing milk. Belijtgen had no such difficulty; for a month or more before the birth, as
was common at the time, her husband had paid an old woman named Maijcke van den Broecke to
suckle his wife’s breasts in order to stimulate the flow of milk.
^*6
But while she lay
wracked with fever, Cornelisz’s wife could not feed the child, and Jeronimus was
forced to seek a nurse. His choice fell on a woman named Heyltgen Jansdr, who lived in an
alleyway off the St. Jansstraat in the north quarter of Haarlem.

Cornelisz and his wife seem to have been notably poor judges of character. Their
midwife had already proved to be a madwoman, and in Heyltgen Jansdr they had unearthed a
similarly disreputable character. The least inquiry among her neighbors and acquaintances
would have revealed her as a woman of hot temper and low morals, who was known to be
unfaithful to her husband and who suffered from a mysterious and long-term illness. But,
for whatever reason, the apothecary did not trouble to discover this.