12 December, in the year of our Lord 2022
Up, after a poor sleep, my mind still much troubled for the health of my father and my mother crying out during the night that she did not know who was beside her, so that I was fain to comfort her in the dark and she slept again. At eight a’clock, it being a necessetie to send a Messenger at such an hour to receive any attencion, did ask that my fathers own Physician call upon the house. Then set to clear a little space upon the table for breakfast, which for my mother was a wheatabicks with milk, weevils and a little sugar, and for myselfe a cooked English, and the mayde come at the same time. At a half past eleven a’clock comes Dr. Pulford, who examined my father in bed, and did find him gravely ill; and it transpyres that another Physician did come from his Practice on Friday last but the Physick he prescribed not yet dispensed by the apothecary. Now my father placed me in a great quanderie, again adamant in his refusal to go into Hospitall. Dr. P— in extremis summoned a Messenger, a lad no more than fourteen years, but he can run with the best, whom he did send forthwith to request that a nurse who is called Mrs. Icras,* a name I never heared in my entire life, should attend to make an assessment of my fathers fitnesse to remayn at home; but, the lad gone, he vouchsafed to me that he had had no success in the matter these five years past. Then I made to shew him out, but he beckoned me for some private discourse between us two — to wit, the Procedure to be followed should the worst happen, and that my father die. All afternoon with a dread that a great fear was to be realis’d, which was that my father might not outlive my mother. My mind thus divided between despair for the future and the practicalitie of victuals, as an activitie of Displacement I set about the pile of letters, opened and unopened, that lay upon the table and so made space that two of us might supper in comfort, my mother the while asking why my father does not get up from his bed. At night with some effort he rose, though with much trouble, and with my help went in great slowness to his privy; but there nothing passed, which did give me great unease that his humours become unbalanced beyond amelioracion. After the mayde come, by the Messenger back and forth to Mr. M. Jones for some discourse, which done, to bed, though all the while my mind unable to dispence with the question whether the best be done by the day’s decisions, or whether my father must be in Hospitall.
* Cecelia Persephone Icras (1658-1707) was a highly innovative nurse whose contribution to healthcare is only now coming to light. Indeed, ‘Icras’ has since become an acronym derived in her honour from her family name and now used to describe the fully developed role of the ‘Intermediate Community Reablement and Assessment Service’, which exists ‘to support people in the community requiring support of an urgent nature and who are at risk of imminent hospital admission’. It is clear from this diary entry that in seeking Icras’s services Pepys’ father’s physician was leaving no stone unturned in his attempts to respect Pepys’ father’s wishes to remain at home, whilst acknowledging the potential consequences. But as Dr. Pulford must have known, gaining access to these services was very difficult. In fact, so successful was Cecelia Icras in her pioneering role, and so dedicated to it night and day, that to manage the growing demand she became increasingly reliant on a bizarre selection of stimulants, finally succumbing to a surfeit of phlogiston in the precincts of the Royal Society.
Pepys: the Covid Diaries (2020- ) 