either before or after they were shut up, whose misery was not
lessened when they were out, but sadly increased. On the other hand,
many that thus got away had retreats to go to and other houses, where
they locked themselves up and kept hid till the plague was over; and
many families, foreseeing the approach of the distemper, laid up
stores of provisions sufficient for their whole families, and shut
themselves up, and that so entirely that they were neither seen or
heard of till the infection was quite ceased, and then came abroad
sound and well. I might recollect several such as these, and give you
the particulars of their management; for doubtless it was the most
effectual secure step that could be taken for such whose
circumstances would not admit them to remove, or who had not
retreats abroad proper for the case; for in being thus shut up they were
as if they had been a hundred miles off. Nor do I remember that any
one of those families miscarried. Among these, several Dutch
merchants were particularly remarkable, who kept their houses like
little garrisons besieged suffering none to go in or out or come near
them, particularly one in a court in Throgmorton Street whose house
looked into Draper’s Garden.
But I come back to the case of families infected and shut up by the
magistrates. The misery of those families is not to be expressed; and
it was generally in such houses that we heard the most dismal shrieks
and outcries of the poor people, terrified and even frighted to death by
the sight of the condition of their dearest relations, and by the terror of
being imprisoned as they were.
I remember, and while I am writing this story I think I hear the very
sound of it, a certain lady had an only daughter, a young maiden about
nineteen years old, and who was possessed of a very considerable
fortune. They were only lodgers in the house where they were. The
young woman, her mother, and the maid had been abroad on some
occasion, I do not remember what, for the house was not shut up; but
about two hours after they came home the young lady complained she
was not well; in a quarter of an hour more she vomited and had a
violent pain in her head. ‘Pray God’, says her mother, in a terrible
fright, ‘my child has not the distemper!’ The pain in her head
increasing, her mother ordered the bed to be warmed, and resolved to
put her to bed, and prepared to give her things to sweat, which was the
ordinary remedy to be taken when the first apprehensions of the
distemper began.
While the bed was airing the mother undressed the young woman,
and just as she was laid down in the bed, she, looking upon her body
with a candle, immediately discovered the fatal tokens on the inside
of her thighs. Her mother, not being able to contain herself, threw
down her candle and shrieked out in such a frightful manner that it
was enough to place horror upon the stoutest heart in the world; nor
was it one scream or one cry, but the fright having seized her spirits,
she -fainted first, then recovered, then ran all over the house, up the
stairs and down the stairs, like one distracted, and indeed really was
distracted, and continued screeching and crying out for several hours
void of all sense, or at least government of her senses, and, as I was
told, never came thoroughly to herself again. As to the young maiden,
she was a dead corpse from that moment, for the gangrene which
occasions the spots had spread [over] her whole body, and she died in
less than two hours. But still the mother continued crying out, not
knowing anything more of her child, several hours after she was dead.
It is so long ago that I am not certain, but I think the mother never
recovered, but died in two or three weeks after.
This was an extraordinary case, and I am therefore the more
particular in it, because I came so much to the knowledge of it; but