onwards we have the guidance of the “Bills of Mortality” issued in London, which, though drawn up on the evidence of ignorant persons, are doubtless roughly true. The accession of James I. in 1603 was marked by a very destructive plague which killed 38,000 in London. In this and subsequent years the disease was widely diffused in England-for instance, Oxford, Derbyshire, Newcastle. It prevailed at the same time in Holland, and ad done so some years previously in northern Germany. In the same year (1603) one million persons are said to have died of plague in Egypt. This plague is said to have lasted eight years in London. At all events in 1609 we have the second great plague year, with a mortality of 11,785. After this there is a remission till about 1620, when plague again began to spread in northern Europe, especially Germany and Holland, which was at that time ravaged by war. In 1625 (the year of the siege of Breda in Holland) is the third great London plague with 35,417 deaths—though the year 1624 was remarkably exempt, and 1626 nearly so. In 1630 was the great plague of Milan, described by Ripamonti.[1] In 1632 a severe epidemic, apparently plague, was in Derbyshire. 1636 IS the fourth great plague year in London with a mortality of 10,400, and even in the next year 3082 persons died of the same disease. The same year 7000 out of 20,000 inhabitants of Newcastle died of plague; in 1635 it was at Hull About the same time, 1635–1637, plague was prevalent in Holland, and the epidemic of Nijmwegen is celebrated as having been described by Diemerbroeck, whose work (Tractatus de peste, 4to, 1641–1665) is one of the most important on the subject. The English epidemic was widely spread and lasted till 1647, in which year, the mortality amounting to 3597, we have the fifth epidemic in London. The army diseases of the Civil Wars were chiefly typhus and malarial fevers, but plague was not unknown among them, as at Wallingford Castle (Willis, "Of Feavers, " Works, ed. 1681, p. 131) and Dunstar Castle. From this time till 1664 little was heard of plague in England, though it did not cease on the Continent. In Ireland it is said to have been seen for the last time in 1650.[2]
In 1656 one of the most destructive of all recorded epidemics in Europe raged in Naples; it is said to have carried off 300,000 persons in the space of five months. It passed to Rome, but there was much less fatal, making 14,000 victims only-a result attributed by some to the precautions and sanitary measures introduced by Cardinal Gastaldi, whose work, a splendid folio, written on this occasion (Tractatus de avertenda et profliganda peste politicolegalis, Bologna, 1684) is historically one of the most important on the subject of quarantine, &c. Genoa lost 60,000 inhabitants from the same disease, but Tuscany remained untouched. The comparatix ely limited spread of this frightful epidemic in Italy at this time is a most noteworthy fact. Minorca is said to have been depopulated. Nevertheless the epidemic spread in the next few years over Spain and Germany, and a little later to Holland, where Amsterdam in 1663–1664 was again ravaged with a mortality given as 50,000, also Rotterdam and Haarlem. Hamburg suffered in 1664.
The Great Plague of London.—The preceding enumeration will have prepared the reader to view the great plague of 1664–1665 in its true relation to others, and not as an isolated phenomenon. The preceding years had been unusually free from plague, and it was not mentioned inGreat Plague of London. the bills of mortality till in the autumn of 1664 (Nov. 2) a few isolated cases were observed in the parishes of St Giles and St Martin's, Westminster, and a few occurred in the following winter, which was very severe. About May 1665 the disease again became noticeable, and spread, but somewhat slowly. Boghurst, a contemporary doctor, notices that it crept down Holborn and took six months to travel from the western suburbs (St Giles) to the eastern (Stepney) through the city. The mortality rapidly rose from 43 in May to 590 in June, 6137 in July, 17,036 in August, 31,159 in September, after which it began to decline. The total number of deaths from plague in that year, according to the bills of mortality, was 68, 596, in a population estimated at 460,000,[3] out of whom two-thirds are supposed to have fled to escape the contagion. This number is likely to be rather too low than too high, since of the 6432 deaths from spotted fever many were probably really from plague, though not declared so to avoid painful restrictions In December there was a sudden fall in the mortality which continued through the winter, but in 1666 nearly 2000 deaths from plague are recorded.
According to some authorities, especially Hodges, the plague was imported into London by bales of merchandise from Holland, which came originally from the Levant, according to others it was introduced by Dutch prisoners of war; but Boghurst regarded it as of local origin. It is in favour of the theory that it spread by some means from Holland that plague had been all but extinct in London for some seventeen years, and prevailed in Holland in 1663–1664. But from its past history and local conditions, London might well be deemed capable of producing such an epidemic. In the bills of mortality since 1603 there are only three years when no deaths from plague are recorded. The uncleanliness of the city was comparable to that of oriental cities at the present day, and, according to contemporary testimony (Garenciéres, Angliae flagellum, London, 1647, p. 85), little improved since Erasmus wrote his well-known description. The spread of the disease only partially supported the doctrine of contagion, as Boghurst says: “ The disease spread not altogether by contagion at first, nor began only at one place and spread further and further as an eating sore doth all over the body, but fell upon several places of city and suburbs like rain.” In fact dissemination seems to have taken place, as usual, by the conversion of one house after another into a focus of disease, a process favoured by the fatal custom of shutting up infected houses with all their inmates, which was not only almost- equivalent to a sentence of death on all therein, but caused a dangerous concentration of the poison. The well known custom of marking such houses with a red cross and the legend “God have mercy upon us!” was no new thing: it is found in a proclamation in the possession of the present writer dated 1641; and it was probably older still. Hodges testifies to the futility and injurious effects of these regulations. The lord mayor and magistrates not only carried out the appointed administrative measures, but looked to the cleanliness of the city and the relief of the poor, so that there was little or no actual want; and the burial arrangements appear to have been well attended to. The college of physicians, by royal command, put forth such advice and prescriptions as were thought best for the emergency. But it is clear that neither these measures nor medical treatment had any effect in checking the disease. Early in November with colder weather it began to decline; and in December there was so little fear of contagion that those who had left the city “crowded back as thick as they fled.” As has often been observed in other plague epidemics, sound people could enter infected houses and even sleep in the beds of those who had died of the plague “before they were even cold or cleansed from the stench of the diseased” (Hodges). The symptoms of the disease being such as have been generally observed need not be here considered. The disease was, as always, most destructive in squalid, dirty neighbourhoods and among the poor, so as to be called the “poor’s plague.” Those who lived in the town in barges or ships did not take the disease; and the houses on London Bridge were but little affected. Of those doctors who remained in the city some eight or nine died, not a large proportion. Some had the rare courage to investigate the mysterious disease by dissecting the bodies of the dead. Hodges implies that he did so, though he left no full account of his observations. Dr George Thomson, a chemist and a disciple of Van Helmont, followed the example, and nearly lost his life by an attack which immediately followed.[4]
- ↑ Josephus Ripamontius, De peste anni 1630 (Milan, 1641), 4to.
- ↑ For this period see Index to Remembrancia in Archives of City of London 1579–1664 (London, 1878); Richardson, Plague and Pestilence in North of England (Newcastle, 1852).
- ↑ Graunt, Observations on the Bills of Mortality (3rd ed., London, 1665).
- ↑ On the plague of 1665 see Nath. Hodges, Loimologia sive pestis nuperae apud populum londinensem narratio (London, 1672) 8vo—in English by Quincy (London, 1720), (the chief authority); Λοιμογραφία. or an Experimental Relation of the last Plague in the City of London, by William Boghurst, apothecary in St Giles’s-in-the-Fields (London, 1666),—a MS in British Museum (Sloane 349), containing important details; George Thomson, ΛΟΙΜΟΤΟΜΙΑ, or the Pest Anatomized, 8vo (London, 1666); Sydenham, “Febris pestilentialis et pestis annorum 1665–1666,” Opera, ed. Greenhill, p. 96 (London, 1844); Collection of Scarce Pieces on the Plague in 1665 (London, 1721), 8vo; Defoe’s fascinating Journal of a Citizen, which should be read and admired as a fiction, but accepted with caution as history; T. Vincent (minister of the gospel), God’s Terrible Voice in the City, 8vo (London, 1667); Calendar of State Papers (1665–1666; “Domestic” series), by M. E. Green.
