spreading from one to another by any human skill.
Here was indeed one difficulty which I could never thoroughly get
over to this time, and which there is but one way of answering that I
know of, and it is this, viz., the first person that died of the plague was
on December 20, or thereabouts, 1664, and in or about long Acre;
whence the first person had the infection was generally said to be from
a parcel 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 of the distemper being in that place, till the 9th of February, which
was about seven weeks after, and then one more was buried out of the
same house. Then it was hushed, and we were perfectly easy as to the
public for a great while; for there were no more entered in the weekly
bill to be dead of the plague till the 22nd of April, when there was two
more buried, not out of the same house, but out of the same street;
and, as near as I can remember, it was out of the next house to the
first. This was 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 the question seems to lie thus: Where lay the seeds of the
infection all this while? How came it to stop so long, and not stop any
longer? Either the distemper did not come immediately by contagion
from body to body, or, if it did, then a body may be capable to
continue infected without the disease discovering itself many days,
nay, weeks together; even not a quarantine of days only, but
soixantine; not only forty days, but sixty days or longer.
It is true there was, as I observed at first, and is well known to many
yet living, a very cold winter and a long frost which continued three
months; and this, the doctors say, might check the infection; but then
the 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 frozen river
have returned to its usual force and current when it thawed – whereas
the principal recess of this infection, which was from February to
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 think
my own remembrance of the thing will supply; and that is, the fact is
not 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
the 22nd of April. The weekly bills are the only evidence on the other
side, and those bills were not of credit enough, at least with me, to
support an hypothesis or determine a question of such importance as
this; for it was our received opinion at that time, and I believe upon
very good grounds, that the fraud lay in the parish officers, searchers,
and persons appointed to give account of the dead, and what diseases
they died of; and as people were very loth at first to have the
neighbours believe their houses were infected, so they gave money to
procure, or otherwise procured, the dead persons to be returned as
dying of other distempers; and this I know was practised afterwards in
many places, I believe I might say in all places where the distemper
came, as will be seen by the vast increase of the numbers placed in the
weekly bills under other articles of diseases during the time of the
infection. For example, in the months of July and August, when the
plague was coming on to its highest pitch, it was very ordinary to have
from a thousand to twelve hundred, nay, to almost fifteen hundred a
week of other distempers. Not that the numbers of those distempers
were really increased to such a degree, but the great number of