was in proportion as great. Our bills of mortality could give but little
light in this, yet some it did. There were several more than usual
starved at nurse, but this was nothing. The misery was where they
were, first, starved for want of a nurse, the mother dying and all the
family and the infants found dead by them, merely for want; and, if I
may speak my opinion, I do believe that many hundreds of poor
helpless infants perished in this manner. Secondly, not starved, but
poisoned by the nurse. Nay, even where the mother has been nurse,
and having received the infection, has poisoned, that is, infected the
infant with her milk even before they knew they were infected
themselves; nay, and the infant has died in such a case before the
mother. I cannot but remember to leave this admonition upon record,
if ever such another dreadful visitation should happen in this city, that
all women that are with child or that give suck should be gone, if they
have any possible means, out of the place, because their misery, if
infected, will so much exceed all other people’s.
I could tell here dismal stories of living infants being found sucking
the breasts of their mothers, or nurses, after they have been dead of
the plague. Of a mother in the parish where I lived, who, having a
child that was not well, sent for an apothecary to view the child; and
when he came, as the relation goes, was giving the child suck at her
breast, and to all appearance was herself very well; but when the
apothecary came close to her he saw the tokens upon that breast with
which she was suckling the child. He was surprised enough, to be
sure, but, not willing to fright the poor woman too much, he desired
she would give the child into his hand; so he takes the child, and
going to a cradle in the room, lays it in, and opening its cloths, found
the tokens upon the child too, and both died before he could get home
to send a preventive medicine to the father of the child, to whom he
had told their condition. Whether the child infected the nurse-mother
or the mother the child was not certain, but the last most likely.
Likewise of a child brought home to the parents from a nurse that had
died of the plague, yet the tender mother would not refuse to take in
her child, and laid it in her bosom, by which she was infected; and
died with the child in her arms dead also.
It would make the hardest heart move at the instances that were
frequently found of tender mothers tending and watching with their
dear children, and even dying before them, and sometimes taking the
distemper from them and dying, when the child for whom the
affectionate heart had been sacrificed has got over it and escaped.
The like of a tradesman in East Smithfield, whose wife was big with
child of her first child, and fell in labour, having the plague upon her.
He could neither get midwife to assist her or nurse to tend her, and
two servants which he kept fled both from her. He ran from house to
house like one distracted, but could get no help; the utmost he could
get was, that a watchman, who attended at an infected house shut up,
promised to send a nurse in the morning. The poor man, with his
heart broke, went back, assisted his wife what he could, acted the part
of the midwife, brought the child dead into the world, and his wife in
about an hour died in his arms, where he held her dead body fast till
the morning, when the watchman came and brought the nurse as he
had promised; and coming up the stairs (for he had left the door open,
or only latched), they found the man sitting with his dead wife in his
arms, and so overwhelmed with grief that he died in a few hours after
without any sign of the infection upon him, but merely sunk under the
weight of his grief.