A Journal of the Plague-Year. to Which Is Added Some Account of the Great Fire in 1666, Extr. from Evelyn's Memoirs (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1871. Excerpt: ... concealed the persons being sick, would have been such that the distemper would sometimes have seized a whole family before any visitors or examiners could have known of it. On the other hand, the prodigious numbers who would have been sick, at a time, would have exceeded all the capacity of public pesthouses to receive them, or of public officers to discover and remove them. This was well considered in those days, and I have heard them talk of it often. The magistrates had enough to do to bring people to submit to having their houses shut up, and many ways they deceived the watchmen and got out, as I have observed; but that difficulty made it apparent that they would have found it impracticable to have gone the other way to work; for they could never have forced the sick people out of their beds, and out of their dwellings. It must not have been my Lord Mayor's officers, but an army of officers, that must have attempted it; and the people, on the other hand, would have been enraged and desperate, and would have killed those who would have offered to have meddled with them, or with their children and relations, whatever had befallen them for it; so that they would have made the people, who, as it was, were in the most terrible distraction imaginable; I say, they would have made them stark mad Whereas the magistrates found it proper on several occasions to treat them with lenity and compassion, and not with violence and terror, such as dragging the sick out of their houses, or obliging them to remove themselves, would have been. This leads me again to mention the time when the plague first began, that is to say, when it became certain it would spread over the whole town, when, as I have said, the better sort of people first took the alarm, and began to hu...