History of the Plague in London

by Daniel Defoe

which they seldom lived six hours; for thosespots they called the tokens were really gangrene spots, or mortifiedflesh, in small knobs as broad as a little silver penny, and hard as apiece of callus[264] or horn; so that when the disease was come up tothat length, there was nothing could follow but certain death. And yet,as I said, they knew nothing of their being infected, nor foundthemselves so much as out of order, till those mortal marks were uponthem. But everybody must allow that they were infected in a high degreebefore, and must have been so some time; and consequently their breath,their sweat, their very clothes, were contagious for many days before.

  This occasioned a vast variety of cases, which physicians would havemuch more opportunity to remember than I; but some came within thecompass of my observation or hearing, of which I shall name a few.

  A certain citizen who had lived safe and untouched till the month ofSeptember, when the weight of the distemper lay more in the city than ithad done before, was mighty cheerful, and something too bold, as I thinkit was, in his talk of how secure he was, how cautious he had been, andhow he had never come near any sick body. Says another citizen, aneighbor of his, to him one day, "Do not be too confident, Mr. ----: itis hard to say who is sick and who is well; for we see men alive andwell to outward appearance one hour, and dead the next."--"That istrue," says the first man (for he was not a man presumptuously secure,but had escaped a long while; and men, as I have said above, especiallyin the city, began to be overeasy on that score),--"that is true," sayshe. "I do not think myself secure; but I hope I have not been in companywith any person that there has been any danger in."--"No!" says hisneighbor. "Was not you at the Bull Head Tavern in Gracechurch Street,with Mr. ----, the night before last?"--"Yes," says the first, "I was;but there was nobody there that we had any reason to think dangerous."Upon which his neighbor said no more, being unwilling to surprise him.But this made him more inquisitive, and, as his neighbor appearedbackward, he was the more impatient; and in a kind of warmth says healoud, "Why, he is not dead, is he?" Upon which his neighbor still wassilent, but cast up his eyes, and said something to himself; at whichthe first citizen turned pale, and said no more but this, "Then I am adead man too!" and went home immediately, and sent for a neighboringapothecary to give him something preventive, for he had not yet foundhimself ill. But the apothecary, opening his breast, fetched a sigh, andsaid no more but this, "Look up to God." And the man died in a fewhours.

  Now, let any man judge from a case like this if it is possible for theregulations of magistrates, either by shutting up the sick or removingthem, to stop an infection which spreads itself from man to man evenwhile they are perfectly well, and insensible of its approach, and maybe so for many days.

  It may be proper to ask here how long it may be supposed men might havethe seeds of the contagion in them before it discovered[265] itself inthis fatal manner, and how long they might go about seemingly whole, andyet be contagious to all those that came near them. I believe the mostexperienced physicians cannot answer this question directly any morethan I can; and something an ordinary observer may take notice of whichmay pass their observation. The opinion of physicians abroad seems tobe, that it may lie dormant in the spirits, or in the blood vessels, avery considerable time: why else do they exact a quarantine of those whocome into their harbors and ports from suspected places? Forty days is,one would think, too long for nature to struggle with such an enemy asthis, and not conquer it or yield to it; but I could not think by my ownobservation that they can be infected, so as to be contagious to others,above fifteen or sixteen days at farthest; and on that score it was,that when a house was shut up in the city, and any one had died of theplague, but nobody appeared to be ill in the family for sixteen oreighteen days after, they were not so strict but that they[266] wouldconnive at their going privately abroad; nor would people be much afraidof them afterwards, but rather think they were fortified the better,having not been vulnerable when the enemy was in their house: but wesometimes found it had lain much longer concealed.

  Upon the foot of all these observations I must say, that, thoughProvidence seemed to direct my conduct to be otherwise, it is myopinion, and I must leave it as a prescription, viz., that the bestphysic against the plague is to run away from it. I know peopleencourage themselves by saying, "God is able to keep us in the midst ofdanger, and able to overtake us when we think ourselves out of danger;"and this kept thousands in the town whose carcasses went into the greatpits by cartloads, and who, if they had fled from the danger, had, Ibelieve, been safe from the disaster: at least, 'tis probable they hadbeen safe.

  And were this very fundamental[267] only duly considered by the peopleon any future occasion of this or the like nature, I am persuaded itwould put them upon quite different measures for managing the peoplefrom those that they took in 1665, or than any that have been takenabroad that I have heard of: in a word, they would consider ofseparating the people into smaller bodies, and removing them in timefarther from one another, and not let such a contagion as this, which isindeed chiefly dangerous to collected bodies of people, find a millionof people in a body together, as was very near the case before, andwould certainly be the case if it should ever appear again.

  The plague, like a great fire, if a few houses only are contiguous whereit happens, can only[268] burn a few houses; or if it begins in asingle, or, as we call it, a lone house, can only burn that lone housewhere it begins; but if it begins in a close-built town or city, andgets ahead, there its fury increases, it rages over the whole place, andconsumes all it can reach.

  I could propose many schemes on the foot of which the government ofthis city, if ever they should be under the apprehension of such anotherenemy, (God forbid they should!) might ease themselves of the greatestpart of the dangerous people that belong to them: I mean such as thebegging, starving, laboring poor, and among them chiefly those who, in acase of siege, are called the useless mouths; who, being then prudently,and to their own advantage, disposed of, and the wealthy inhabitantsdisposing of themselves, and of their servants and children, the cityand its adjacent parts would be so effectually evacuated that therewould not be above a tenth part of its people left together for thedisease to take hold upon. But suppose them to be a fifth part, and thattwo hundred and fifty thousand people were left; and if it did seizeupon them, they would, by their living so much at large, be much betterprepared to defend themselves against the infection, and be less liableto the effects of it, than if the same number of people lived closetogether in one smaller city, such as Dublin, or Amsterdam, or the like.

  It is true, hundreds, yea thousands, of families fled away at this lastplague; but then of them many fled too late, and not only died in theirflight, but carried the distemper with them into the countries wherethey went, and infected those whom they went among for safety; whichconfounded[269] the thing, and made that be a propagation of thedistemper which was the best means to prevent it. And this, too, isevident of it, and brings me back to what I only hinted at before, butmust speak more fully to here, namely, that men went about apparentlywell many days after they had the taint of the disease in their vitals,and after their spirits were so seized as that they could never escapeit; and that, all the while they did so, they were dangerous to others.I say, this proves that so it was; for such people infected the verytowns they went through, as well as the families they went among; and itwas by that means that almost all the great towns in England had thedistemper among them more or less, and always they would tell you sucha Londoner or such a Londoner brought it down.

  It must not be omitted,[270] that when I speak of those people who werereally thus dangerous, I suppose them to be utterly ignorant of theirown condition; for if they really knew their circumstances to be such asindeed they were, they must have been a kind of willful murderers ifthey would have gone abroad among healthy people, and it would haveverified indeed the suggestion which I mentioned above, and which Ithought seemed untrue, viz., that the infected people were utterlycareless as to giving the infection to o
thers, and rather forward to doit than not; and I believe it was partly from this very thing that theyraised that suggestion, which I hope was not really true in fact.

  I confess no particular case is sufficient to prove a general; but Icould name several people, within the knowledge of some of theirneighbors and families yet living, who showed the contrary to anextreme. One man, the master of a family in my neighborhood, having hadthe distemper, he thought he had it given him by a poor workman whom heemployed, and whom he went to his house to see, or went for some workthat he wanted to have finished; and he had some apprehensions evenwhile he was at the poor workman's door, but did not discover it[271]fully; but the next day it discovered itself, and he was taken very ill,upon which he immediately caused himself to be carried into anoutbuilding which he had in his yard, and where there was a chamber