himself he went distracted, and would have laid violent hands upon
himself, but was kept from that by those who looked to him, and in a
few days died.
(2) The other particular is, that many people having been well to the
best of their own judgement, or by the best observation which they
could make of themselves for several days, and only finding a decay
of appetite, or a light sickness upon their stomachs; nay, some whose
appetite has been strong, and even craving, and only a light pain in
their heads, have sent for physicians to know what ailed them, and
have been found, to their great surprise, at the brink of death: the
tokens upon them, or the plague grown up to an incurable height.
It was very sad to reflect how such a person as this last mentioned
above had been a walking destroyer perhaps for a week or a fortnight
before that; how he had ruined those that he would have hazarded his
life to save, and had been breathing death upon them, even perhaps in
his tender kissing and embracings of his own children. Yet thus
certainly it was, and often has been, and I could give many particular
cases where it has been so. If then the blow is thus insensibly striking
– if the arrow flies thus unseen, and cannot be discovered – to what
purpose are all the schemes for shutting up or removing the sick
people? Those schemes cannot take place but upon those that appear
to be sick, or to be infected; whereas there are among them at the
same time thousands of people who seem to be well, but are all that
while carrying death with them into all companies which they come into.
This frequently puzzled our physicians, and especially the
apothecaries and surgeons, who knew not how to discover the sick
from the sound; they all allowed that it was really so, that many
people had the plague in their very blood, and preying upon their
spirits, and were in themselves but walking putrefied carcases whose
breath was infectious and their sweat poison, and yet were as well to
look on as other people, and even knew it not themselves; I say, they
all allowed that it was really true in fact, but they knew not how to
propose a discovery.
My friend Dr Heath was of opinion that it might be known by the
smell of their breath; but then, as he said, who durst smell to that
breath for his information? since, to know it, he must draw the stench
of the plague up into his own brain, in order to distinguish the smell!
I have heard it was the opinion of others that it might be distinguished
by the party’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, and devils, 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 the experiment with.
It was the opinion also of another learned man, that the breath of
such a 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 the
latter, it would cause them to be roupy, as they call it; particularly that
if they had laid any eggs at any time, they would be all rotten. But
those are opinions which I never found supported by any experiments,
or heard of others that had seen it; so I leave them as I find them;
only with this remark, namely, that I think the probabilities are
very strong for them.
Some have proposed that such persons should breathe hard upon
warm water, and that they would leave an unusual scum upon it, or
upon several 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
such that it was impossible to discover it at all, or to prevent its