History of the Plague in London

by Daniel Defoe

overa workhouse, the man being a brazier. Here he lay, and here he died, andwould be tended by none of his neighbors but by a nurse from abroad, andwould not suffer his wife, nor children, nor servants, to come up intothe room, lest they should be infected, but sent them his blessing andprayers for them by the nurse, who spoke it to them at a distance; andall this for fear of giving them the distemper, and without which, heknew, as they were kept up, they could not have it.

  And here I must observe also that the plague, as I suppose alldistempers do, operated in a different manner on differingconstitutions. Some were immediately overwhelmed with it, and it came toviolent fevers, vomitings, insufferable headaches, pains in the back,and so up to ravings and ragings with those pains; others with swellingsand tumors in the neck or groin, or armpits, which, till they could bebroke, put them into insufferable agonies and torment; while others, asI have observed, were silently infected, the fever preying upon theirspirits insensibly, and they seeing little of it till they fell intoswooning and faintings, and death without pain.

  I am not physician enough to enter into the particular reasons andmanner of these differing effects of one and the same distemper, and ofits differing operation in several bodies; nor is it my business here torecord the observations which I really made, because the doctorsthemselves have done that part much more effectually than I can do, andbecause my opinion may in some things differ from theirs. I am onlyrelating what I know, or have heard, or believe, of the particularcases, and what fell within the compass of my view, and the differentnature of the infection as it appeared in the particular cases which Ihave related; but this may be added too, that though the former sort ofthose cases, namely, those openly visited, were the worst for themselvesas to pain (I mean those that had such fevers, vomitings, headaches,pains, and swellings), because they died in such a dreadful manner, yetthe latter had the worst state of the disease; for in the former theyfrequently recovered, especially if the swellings broke; but the latterwas inevitable death. No cure, no help, could be possible; nothing couldfollow but death. And it was worse, also, to others; because, as above,it secretly and unperceived by others or by themselves, communicateddeath to those they conversed with, the penetrating poison insinuatingitself into their blood in a manner which it was impossible to describe,or indeed conceive.

  This infecting and being infected without so much as its being known toeither person is evident from two sorts of cases which frequentlyhappened at that time; and there is hardly anybody living, who was inLondon during the infection, but must have known several of the cases ofboth sorts.

  1. Fathers and mothers have gone about as if they had been well, andhave believed themselves to be so, till they have insensibly infectedand been the destruction of their whole families; which they would havebeen far from doing if they had had the least apprehensions of theirbeing unsound and dangerous themselves. A family, whose story I haveheard, was thus infected by the father, and the distemper began toappear upon some of them even before he found it upon himself; but,searching more narrowly, it appeared he had been infected some time,and, as soon as he found that his family had been poisoned by himself,he went distracted, and would have laid violent hands upon himself, butwas kept from that by those who looked to him; and in a few days hedied.

  2. The other particular is, that many people, having been well to thebest of their own judgment, or by the best observation which they couldmake of themselves for several days, and only finding a decay ofappetite, or a light sickness upon their stomachs,--nay, some whoseappetite has been strong, and even craving, and only a light pain intheir heads,--have sent for physicians to know what ailed them, and havebeen found, to their great surprise, at the brink of death, the tokensupon them, or the plague grown up to an incurable height.

  It was very sad to reflect how such a person as this last mentionedabove had been a walking destroyer, perhaps for a week or fortnightbefore that; how he had ruined those that he would have hazarded hislife to save, and had been breathing death upon them, even perhaps inhis tender kissing and embracings of his own children. Yet thuscertainly it was, and often has been, and I could give many particularcases where it has been so. If, then, the blow is thus insensiblystriking; if the arrow flies thus unseen, and cannot be discovered,--towhat purpose are all the schemes for shutting up or removing the sickpeople? Those schemes cannot take place but upon those that appear tobe sick or to be infected; whereas there are among them at the same timethousands of people who seem to be well, but are all that while carryingdeath with them into all companies which they come into.

  This frequently puzzled our physicians, and especially the apothecariesand surgeons, who knew not how to discover the sick from the sound. Theyall allowed that it was really so; that many people had the plague intheir very blood, and preying upon their spirits, and were in themselvesbut walking putrefied carcasses, whose breath was infectious, and theirsweat poison, and yet were as well to look on as other people, and evenknew it not themselves,--I say they all allowed that it was really truein fact, but they knew not how to propose a discovery.[272]

  My friend Dr. Heath was of opinion that it might be known by the smellof their breath; but then, as he said, who durst smell to that breathfor his information, since to know it he must draw the stench of theplague up into his own brain in order to distinguish the smell? I haveheard it was the opinion of others that it might be distinguished by theparty's breathing upon a piece of glass, where, the breath condensing,there might living creatures be seen by a microscope, of strange,monstrous, and frightful shapes, such as dragons, snakes, serpents, anddevils, horrible to behold. But this I very much question the truth of,and we had no microscopes at that time, as I remember, to make theexperiment with.[273]

  It was the opinion, also, of another learned man that the breath of sucha person would poison and instantly kill a bird, not only a small bird,but even a cock or hen; and that, if it did not immediately kill thelatter, it would cause them to be roupy,[274] as they call it;particularly that, if they had laid any eggs at that time, they would beall rotten. But those are opinions which I never found supported by anyexperiments, or heard of others that had seen it,[275] so I leave themas I find them, only with this remark, namely, that I think theprobabilities are very strong for them.

  Some have proposed that such persons should breathe hard upon warmwater, and that they would leave an unusual scum upon it, or uponseveral other things, especially such as are of a glutinous substance,and are apt to receive a scum, and support it.

  But, from the whole, I found that the nature of this contagion was suchthat it was impossible to discover it at all, or to prevent it spreadingfrom one to another by any human skill.

  Here was indeed one difficulty, which I could never thoroughly get overto this time, and which there is but one way of answering that I knowof, and it is this; viz., the first person that died of the plague wason December 20th, or thereabouts, 1664, and in or about Longacre: whencethe first person had the infection was generally said to be from aparcel of silks imported from Holland, and first opened in that house.

  But after this we heard no more of any person dying of the plague, or ofthe distemper being in that place, till the 9th of February, which wasabout seven weeks after, and then one more was buried out of the samehouse. Then it was hushed, and we were perfectly easy as to the publicfor a great while; for there were no more entered in the weekly bill tobe dead of the plague till the 22d of April, when there were two moreburied, not out of the same house, but out of the same street; and, asnear as I can remember, it was out of the next house to the first. Thiswas nine weeks asunder; and after this we had no more till a fortnight,and then it broke out in several streets, and spread every way. Now, thequestion seems to lie thus: Where lay the seeds of the infection allthis while? how came it to stop so long, and not stop any longer? Eitherthe distemper did not come immediately by contagion from body to body,or, if it did, then a body may be capable to continue infected, withoutthe disease discovering itself, many days,
nay, weeks together; even nota quarantine[276] of days only, but a soixantine,[277]--not only fortydays, but sixty days, or longer.

  It is true there was, as I observed at first, and is well known to manyyet living, a very cold winter and a long frost, which continued threemonths; and this, the doctors say, might check the infection. But thenthe learned must allow me to say, that if, according to their notion,the disease was, as I may say, only frozen up, it would, like a frozenriver, have returned to its usual force and current when it thawed;whereas the principal recess of this infection, which was from Februaryto April, was after the frost was broken and the weather mild and warm.

  But there is another way of solving all this difficulty, which I thinkmy own remembrance of the thing will supply; and that is, the fact isnot granted, namely, that there died none in those long intervals, viz.,from the 20th of December to the 9th of February, and from thence to the22d of April. The weekly bills are the only evidence on the other