Searchers of the dead, women pensioners hired to examine and codify diseased bodies, were significant figures in the management of early modern plague epidemics, but have remained seriously neglected by scholars. This essay reclaims the searchers by investigating archival material such as parish records, legal documents, and bills of mortality. Active members of their parishes, the searchers occupied a paradoxical relationship to authority: subjected to the dangers of plague because of their economic dependence, the searchers also commanded tremendous power to define matters of life and death by literally naming plague on the bodies of their neighbours.

While there is much excellent scholarship on the topics of poor relief and plague management in England, less attention has been paid to how they function together, especially given that they were housed in the same administrative unit of the parish. This article focuses on one key area of overlap: the medical labour performed by poor women as nurses or ‘keepers’ for their neighbours and as ‘searchers’ for epidemiological purposes in the period 1560–1600. Examining primarily parish records, such as churchwardens’ account books and vestry minutes, I make a three‐fold argument: first, women's labour became systematized as part of charitable parish care, as keeping duties rose to the level of visible economic exchange; second, the labour of keeping provided the foundation for the development of women's roles as plague searchers; and third, together those roles indicate a deliberate structure implemented in London to confront issues of public health (poverty, vagrancy, epidemics) that is worth considering in its own right.

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