their very clothes retained the infection, their hands would infect the
things they touched, especially if they were warm and sweaty, and
they were generally apt to sweat too.
Now it was impossible to know these people, nor did they
sometimes, as I have said, know themselves to be infected. These
were the people that so often dropped down and fainted in the streets;
for oftentimes they would go about the streets to the last, till on a
sudden they would sweat, grow faint, sit down at a door and die. It is
true, finding themselves thus, they would struggle hard to get home to
their own doors, or at other times would be just able to go into their
houses and die instantly; other times they would go about till they had
the very tokens come out upon them, and yet not know it, and would
die in an hour or two after they came home, but be well as long as
they were abroad. These were the dangerous people; these were the
people of whom the well people ought to have been afraid; but then,
on the other side, it was impossible to know them.
And this is the reason why it is impossible in a visitation to prevent
the spreading of the plague by the utmost human vigilance: viz., that it
is impossible to know the infected people from the sound, or that the
infected people should perfectly know themselves. I knew a man who
conversed freely in London all the season of the plague in 1665, and
kept about him an antidote or cordial on purpose to take when he
thought himself in any danger, and he had such a rule to know or have
warning of the danger by as indeed I never met with before or since.
How far it may be depended on I know not. He had a wound in his
leg, and whenever he came among any people that were not sound,
and the infection began to affect him, he said he could know it by that
signal, viz., that his wound in his leg would smart, and look pale and
white; so as soon as ever he felt it smart it was time for him to
withdraw, or to take care of himself, taking his drink, which he always
carried about him for that purpose. Now it seems he found his wound
would smart many times when he was in company with such who
thought themselves to be sound, and who appeared so to one another;
but he would presently rise up and say publicly, ‘Friends, here is
somebody in the room that has the plague’, and so would immediately
break up the company. This was indeed a faithful monitor to all
people that the plague is not to be avoided by those that converse
promiscuously in a town infected, and people have it when they know
it not, and that they likewise give it to others when they know not that
they have it themselves; and in this case shutting up the well or
removing the sick will not do it, unless they can go back and shut up
all those that the sick had conversed with, even before they knew
themselves to be sick, and none knows how far to carry that back, or
where to stop; for none knows when or where or how they may have
received the infection, or from whom.
This I take to be the reason which makes so many people talk of the
air being corrupted and infected, and that they need not be cautious of
whom they converse with, for that the contagion was in the air. I have
seen them in strange agitations and surprises on this account. ‘I have
never come near any infected body’, says the disturbed person; ‘I have
conversed with none but sound, healthy people, and yet I have gotten
the distemper!’ ‘I am sure I am struck from Heaven’, says another, and
he falls to the serious part. Again, the first goes on exclaiming, ‘I have
come near no infection or any infected person; I am sure it is the air.
We draw in death when we breathe, and therefore ’tis the hand of