On the night of the nineteenth of November in 1628, a young widow by the name of Elizabeth Bennett was asleep in her house in the London parish of St. Olave. Only seven months earlier, the Widow Bennett had lost her husband Richard, a wealthy Mercer who had made his wife sole executrix of his estate and heir to two-thirds of it, including their fine house in the Old Jewry and a coach with four horses. As a widow worth £20,000, Elizabeth was already besieged by suitors. On that November night, however, one of them – a physician named John Raven – figured he would get the jump on the others. He bribed Elizabeth's servants to let him into her bedchamber, whereupon, in the words of the diarist John Rous, the widow awoke to find Dr. Raven “put[ting] his legge into the bedde” (34). It appears, though, that not much more of Dr. Raven than his “legge” made it into the widow's bed, for when she realized who it was, she cried out “Thieves!” and “Murder!” and proceeded to have her over-eager suitor hauled off to the constable. Perhaps the doctor's medical training had something to do with why he thought the widow would respond to his methods: “what shall we say,” writes Nicholas Fontanus in The Woman's Doctor (1652),