goods brought over from Holland, and brought thither from the
Levant; the first breaking of it out in a house in Long Acre where
those goods were carried and first opened; its spreading from that
house to other houses by the visible unwary conversing with those
who were sick; and the infecting the parish officers who were
employed about the persons dead, and the like. These are known
authorities for this great foundation point – that it went on and
proceeded from person to person and from house to house, and no
otherwise. In the first house that was infected there died four persons.
A neighbour, hearing the mistress of the first house was sick, went to
visit her, and went home and gave the distemper to her family, and
died, and all her household. A minister, called to pray with the first
sick person in the second house, was said to sicken immediately and
die with several more in his house. Then the physicians began to
consider, for they did not at first dream of a general contagion. But
the physicians being sent to inspect the bodies, they assured the
people that it was neither more or less than the plague, with all its
terrifying particulars, and that it threatened an universal infection, so
many people having already conversed with the sick or distempered,
and having, as might be supposed, received infection from them, that
it would be impossible to put a stop to it.
Here the opinion of the physicians agreed with my observation
afterwards, namely, that the danger was spreading insensibly, for the
sick could infect none but those that came within reach of the sick
person; but that one man who may have really received the infection
and knows it not, but goes abroad and about as a sound person, may
give the plague to a thousand people, and they to greater numbers in
proportion, and neither the person giving the infection or the persons
receiving it know anything of it, and perhaps not feel the effects of it
for several days after.
For example, many persons in the time of this visitation never
perceived that they were infected till they found to their unspeakable
surprise, the tokens come out upon them; after which they seldom
lived six hours; for those spots they called the tokens were really
gangrene spots, or mortified flesh in small knobs as broad as a little
silver penny, and hard as a piece of callus or horn; so that, when the
disease was come up to that length, there was nothing could follow
but certain death; and yet, as I said, they knew nothing of their being
infected, nor found themselves so much as out of order, till those
mortal marks were upon them. But everybody must allow that they
were infected in a high degree before, 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 have
much more opportunity to remember than I; but some came within
the compass of my observation or hearing, of which I shall name a few.
A certain citizen who had lived safe and untouched till the month of
September, when the weight of the distemper lay more in the city than
it had done before, was mighty cheerful, and something too bold (as I
think it was) in his talk of how secure he was, how cautious he had
been, and how he had never come near any sick body. Says another
citizen, a neighbour of his, to him one day, ‘Do not be too confident,
Mr -; it is hard to say who is sick and who is well, for we see men
alive and well to outward appearance one hour, and dead the next.’
‘That is true’, says the first man, for he was not a man presumptuously
secure, but had escaped a long while – and men, as I said above,
especially in the city began to be over-easy upon that score. ‘That is
true,’ says he; ‘I do not think myself secure, but I hope I have not been