104 BRITISH PHYSICIANS. in London, Westminster, and within the bills of mortality*. Sydenham returned to London so very soon, and when the plague continued still so very vio- lent, " that it could not be (he says with great modesty) but by reason of scarcity of better physi- cians, I should be called in to the assistance of those who had the disease." Thus he saw both the beginning and the end of this great epidemic, and he did not neglect to profit by his 023portu- nities of observation. His method of practice was to bleed very largely ; and he relates the case of a noble lady, of about twenty-one years of age, of a sanguine complexion, to whom lie was called in the beginning of May 1665 (before lie left London) , who was bled once or twice, but not suf- ficiently, and whom he thought he might have saved by a more liberal use of the lancet. In proof of the benefit of bleeding, he mentions an occurrence, related to him by the Hon. Francis Windham, governor of Dunster Castle, in Somer- setshire, during the civil wars. It happened that,
- Since the plague of loGS, this country has happily, in conse-
quence of the establishment of the laws of quarantine, been pro- tected from these awful epidemics; of these, the last was cer- tainly the most terrible, but the History of England contains re- cords of similar visitations, almost as calamitous. In the Diary of Evelyn, the following notice occurs, relating to a period forty years only before the date of this, which has been called, emphatically, t7ie great plague, and when he was but five years of age : " 1625. I was, this year, sent by my father to Lewes in Sussex, to be with my grandfather, Stansfieid, with whom I passed my childhood. This was the year in which the pestilence was so epi- demical, that there dy'd in London five thousand a week ; and I ■well remember the strict watches and examinations upon the ways as ye passed."
