Plague

“ Still recurring scenes of misery and pain, the fruits of this distemper, made no more a part of our lives—the word plague no longer rung in our ears—the aspect of plague incarnate in the human countenance no longer appeared before our eyes. From this moment I saw plague no more. She abdicated her throne, and despoiled herself of her imperial sceptre among the ice rocks that surrounded us. ”

“ It is a thoroughly well believed theory, that during the continuance of the plague you can’t be ill of any other febrile malady—an unpleasant privilege that! for ill I was, and ill of fever, and I anxiously wished that the ailment might turn out to be anything rather than plague. I had some right to surmise that my illness may have been merely the effect of the hot wind; and this notion was encouraged by the elasticity of my spirits, and by a strong forefeeling that much of my destined life in this world was yet to come, and yet to be fulfilled. ”

“ Another Plague Year would reconcile all these Differences, a close conversing with Death, or with Diseases that threaten Death, would scum off the Gall from our Tempers, remove the Animosities among us, and bring us to see with differing Eyes, than those which we look’d on Things with before; ”

“ One must consider that at the time plague was such an appalling and mysterious disease that even the doctors feared for their lives each day, though it was their business to face it. How much more awful the invisible foe must have seemed to a layman, and still more to one who had to lead the attack on it as he did most cheerfully and energetically without experience of the ways of infectious diseases! ”

“ Supposing that such a plague was to come upon us at the present day, we should consider it to be a terrible annoyance, yet scarcely worthy of the name of plague, and certainly not to be classed with the turning of a river into blood, with the hail and lightning that destroyed the crops and cattle, and with the simultaneous death of the first-born. ”

“ What I mean, is, that a person cannot die of the plague (such as it appears among us) instantaneously, or in a few hours, or even the same day, that he receives the infection. For, you know, Sir, by your long experience in this country, that all such, as have the plague, conceal it as long as they can, and walk about as long as possible. ”

“ The high degree of contagion by which the disorder is propagated from one person to another, enters necessarily into the definition of the plague; without it there is no plague. In a word, if there is a frequent communication, either by commerce or in consequence of war, with Turkey or Egypt, and some persons, or a great number of persons, are attacked with a disorder which corresponds exactly to the definition above given, it is certain that it is the plague.
3. For the answer to this third question, the reader has only to revert to the description of symptoms in note A of the Addenda. ”

“ To realise the horror of the Plague, let us imagine an epidemic as contagious and as infectious as influenza was some few years ago spreading everywhere, the great majority of its victims dying in the most terrible sufferings. ”

“ And the leper in whom the plague is, his clothes shall be rent, and his head bare, and he shall put a covering upon his upper lip, and shall cry, Unclean, unclean. All the days wherein the plague shall be in him he shall be defiled; he is unclean; he shall dwell alone ”

“ On the spread of the Plague is the following:—"The plague is a real poison, which being bred in the southern parts of the world, maintains itself there by circulating from infected persons to goods, that when the constitution of the air happens to favour infection, it rages with great violence." ”

“ My Design in this Discourse being to propose what Measures I think most proper to defend the Nation against the Plague, and for this End to consider the Nature of Pestilential Contagion as far as is necessary to set forth the Reasonableness of the Precepts I shall lay down; before I proceed to any particular Directions, I shall enquire a little into the Causes, whence [Pg 2] the Plague arises, and by what Means the Infection of it is spread. ”

“ The approach of a plague cannot be foretold, either from the constitution of the atmosphere, earthquakes, storms, or any other natural phenomena. 8. The plague is an eruptive disease, and it is known to be so by the certain death of all in whom eruptions do not appear; a tendency to eruption being always observed where life remained long enough. 9. The contagion of the plague diffuses itself from a small space all around, lessening in violence the farther it is diffused. In its most concentrated state it hath proved invincible by medicine ”

“ And if the priest shall look, and, behold, the plague be not spread in the garment, either in the warp, or in the woof, or in any thing of skin; then the priest shall command that they wash the thing wherein the plague is, and he shall shut it up seven days more: and the priest shall look, after that the plague is washed: and, behold, if the plague have not changed its colour, and the plague be not spread, it is unclean; thou shalt burn it in the fire: it is a fret, whether the bareness be within or without. ”

“ All that we know, is this, that the Cause of the Plague, whatever it be, is of such a Nature, that when taken into the Body, it works such Changes in the Blood and Juices, as to produce this Disease, by suddenly giving some Parts of the Humours such corrosive Qualities, that they either excite inward Inflammations and Gangrenes, or push out Carbuncles and Bubo’s ”

“ Of all these notions and views regarding the plague, whose development we have represented, there are two especially, which are prominent in historical importance:—1st, The opinion of learned physicians, that the pestilence, or epidemic constitution, is the parent of various kinds of disease; that the plague sometimes, indeed, but by no means always, originates from it: that, to speak in the language of the moderns, the pestilence bears the same relation to contagion that a predisposing cause does to an occasional cause ”

“ Historians of the plague—Sketch of the four chief pestilences recorded—Origin of the disease—Plague of Athens—Of Constantinople—Of Florence—Of Milan—State of medical knowledge—Plague of London.
A history of the plague, in the hands of one qualified to do justice to the subject by medical knowledge joined to extensive research, might be rendered attractive in no common degree. ”

“ On the subject of contagion people have been embarrassed by confounding the true plague with other malignant diseases. This has been done, not only by the ancients, but by some moderns; and our author quotes Dr. Pye, saying “that any epidemic sickness,231 which rages with more than ordinary violence, and which occasions extraordinary mortality amongst mankind, may be, and is, properly termed a pestilence, or the plague.” ”

“ For example: the Plague amongst Horses continues in their own kind, and so doth the Plague amongst Sheep; and for any thing we know, there may be a plague amongst Vegetables, as well as amongst Animals, and they may not onely infect each other but also those Animals that do feed on those infectious Vegetables: so that Infections may be caused several ways; either by inbreathing and attracting or sucking in the Poyson of the Plague, or by eating and converting it into the substance of the body; for some kinds of poyson are so powerful, as to work onely by way of inbreathing. ”

“ Those dreadful stories you have heard of the plague have very little foundation in truth. I own I have much ado to reconcile myself to the sound of a word which has always given me such terrible ideas, though I am convinced there is little more in it than a fever. ”

“ We learn from hence the reason why when the Plague makes its first Appearance in any Place, though the Number of Sick is exceeding small, yet the Disease usually operates upon them in the most violent manner, and is attended with its very worst Symptoms. ”

“ As for the plague, of which I have made mention in the former books of my history, although it ravaged the whole earth, yet as many men escaped it as perished by it, some of them never taking the contagion, and others recovering from it. ”

“ And here I must observe also that the plague, as I suppose all distempers do, operated in a different manner on differing constitutions; some were immediately overwhelmed with it, and it came to violent fevers, vomitings, insufferable headaches, pains in the back, and so up to ravings and ragings with those pains; others with swellings and tumours in the neck or groin, or armpits, which till they could be broke put them into insufferable agonies and torment ”

“ The Plague of 1636 lasted twelve Years, in eight whereof there died 2000 per annum one with another, and never under 300. The which shews, that the Contagion of the Plague depends more upon the Disposition of the Air, than upon the Effluvia from the Bodies of men. ”

“ The plague, as well as all other epidemical diseases, has it's rise, progress, state, and declension, when it begins to lose it's virulence, and many of the sick recover. Some years it is felt sporadically all the winter ”

“ That is to say, one plague happened about every forty years, so that there never was a time when a recent plague was not in the minds{121} of men. Always they remembered the last visitation, the suddenness and swiftness of destruction, the desolation of houses, the striking down of young and old, the loss of the tender children, the sweet maidens, the gallant youth. ”

“ I suppose professional men will lay very little stress upon all that can be said on pestilential diseases, in general, which happened in wars and sieges two thousand years ago, as applied to the plague properly so called, a disease then confounded with various others from which the accuracy of latter observations have sufficiently distinguished it. ”

“ Fevers, from which People recover without any Discharge by Tumors in the Glands, or by Carbuncles, want the characteristic Signs, which have been shewn to attend the slightest Cases of the true Plague; we cannot, upon any just Ground, certainly conclude them to be a less Degree only of that Distemper: but as far as appears, they are of a different Nature, are not ordinarily Contagious like the Plague, nor yet have any such necessary relation to it, but that such Fevers do sometimes appear, without being followed by a real Pestilence. ”

“ An heroic physician—we remember to have come across the case in some Italian history—finding that a new and mysterious plague is ravaging his city, devotes himself to the preservation of his fellow-citizens, shuts himself up with a subject, takes his observations, consigns them to writing, and, feeling the poison in his own veins, goes calmly to the hospital to die. ”

“ The great plague which wasted Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and reappeared in the seventeenth, had been identified with a disease which yields to enlightened treatment, and its ancient virulence was attributed to ignorance of hygiene, and the filthy habits of a former age. ”

“ Very mild cases occurring in the course of an outbreak of typical plague may be explained by greater power of resistance in individuals, but the epidemic prevalence of a mild illness preceding the appearance of undoubted plague suggests some difference or modification of the exciting cause. ”

“ 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 ”

“ It is the firm faith of almost all the Europeans living in the East, that Plague is conveyed by the touch of infected substances, and that the deadly atoms especially lurk in all kinds of clothes and furs; it is held safer to breathe the same air with a man sick of the Plague, and even to come in contact with his skin, than to be touched by the smallest particle of woollen, or of thread, which may have been within the reach of possible infection. ”

“ The more closely the localities are examined of every situation in which the plague prevails, the more abundant the sources of putrefying animal matter will appear, and the more manifest it will become, not only that such matter must be present, but that it must abound. ”

“ BUT I do not at all see how such a noble Part as the Heart, should be first affected by any particular specifick Quality in the Poison of a Plague, to affect that more than any other; as if it was so frightful, as some would have it, to attack the Principles of Life at once; for the Heart seems at first to be affected chiefly from the Multiplicity of Vessels, and the great Crowd of Circulation that Way, giving Opportunity for the Venom sooner to arrive thither; concerning which we shall have Occasion to say more under that Head of Symptoms. ”

“ The first wave of this plague, in 1348, decimated the population by about one half in the towns and one third in the country. People tried to avoid the plague by flight. The agony and death of so many good people caused some question their belief in God. ”

“ The most memorable example of what has been advanced is afforded by a great pestilence of the fourteenth century, which desolated Asia, Europe, and Africa, and of which the people yet preserve the remembrance in gloomy traditions. It was an oriental plague, marked by inflammatory boils and tumours of the glands, such as break out in no other febrile disease. ”

“ For there are a Set of distinguishing Symptoms as essential to the Pestilence, as the respective Eruptions are to the Small-Pox or Measles; which are indeed (as I have mentioned in the Preface) each of them Plagues of a particular kind.
As the Small-Pox discharges itself by Pustules raised in the Skin; so in the Plague the noxious Humour is thrown out either by Tumors in the Glands, as by a Parotis, Bubo, and the like; or by Carbuncles thrust out upon any part of the Body. ”