In 1665, the Great Plague roared through London's streets and ravaged its inhabitants. On 10 July, in the parish of St. Margaret’s, Westminster, the churchwarden made an unusual notation in the bound book he used exclusively to record the parish's plague-related expenses. Margery Stiffany, one of St. Margaret's poorest parishioners, was paid for ‘her Extraordinary Paynes in looking after ye Visited’. This was significant praise in records that are mostly a list of names with minimal detail; of the as many as 414 men and women who nursed the plague sick in St. Margaret’s, Stiffany is the only woman who merited more comment than her name and role. She was paid for plague nursing seven times that year—an exceptional number, considering that only 22 women were paid for nursing more than three times.

That Margery Stiffany warranted such a response in the churchwardens’ accounts would have been surprising to most Londoners, many of whom dreaded the prospect of catching plague and becoming the charge of a parishassigned nurse. Medical practitioners and polemical writers described the horrors of a plague nurse's care. Plague doctor Nathaniel Hodges described in lurid detail how rather than tend and nurture their patients, plague nurses, ‘out of Greediness to plunder the Dead, would Strangle their Patients, and charge it to the distemper in their Throats’. Indeed, he continued, ‘nothing […] deterred these abandoned Miscreants from prosecuting their avaritious Purposes by all the Methods their Wickedness could invent’.