The History of the Great Plague in London, in the Year 1655; Containing Observations and Memorials of the Most Remarkable Occurrences, Both Public and Private, That Happened During That Dreadful Period (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. 1819. Excerpt: ... being then left at liberty, would certainly spread it among others. The methods also in private families, which would have been universally used to have concealed the distemper, and to have 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 which would have been sick at a time, would have exceeded all the capacity of public pest-houses to receive them, or of public officers to discover and remove them. This was well considered in those daysj 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 1 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 that should 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 accounts 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 ...