Controlling Corruption: regulating meat consumption as a preventative to plague in seventeenth-century London

Seventeenth-century medical theory saw epidemic diseases like theplague as being caused by stinking miasmas resulting from putrefying matterpolluting the air. The butchers’ trade was singled out in London as amajor polluter,implicated in both the regulatory literature and popular images as corruptingboth the physical and moral health of the City and its citizens. Controlling thefood trades, especially the butchers’, was therefore an essential part of containingenvironmental pollution and preventing disease.