In the execution of this office I could not refrain speaking my opinion among my neighbours as to this shutting up the people in their houses;in which we saw most evidently the severities that were used,though grievous in themselves,had also this particular objection against them:namely,that they did not answer the end,as I have said,but that the distempered people went day by day about the streets;and it was our united opinion that a method to have removed the sound from the sick,in case of a particular house being visited,would have been much more reasonable on many accounts,leaving nobody with the sick persons but such as should on such occasion request to stay and declare themselves content to be shut up with them Our scheme for removing those that were sound from those that were sick was only in such houses as were infected,and confining the sick was no confinement;those that could not stir would not complain while they were in their senses and while they had the power of judging.Indeed,when they came to be delirious and light-headed,then they would cry out of the cruelty of being confined;but for the removal of those that were well,we thought it highly reasonable and just,for their own sakes,they should be removed from the sick,and that for other people's safety they should keep retired for a while,to see that they were sound,and might not infect others;and we thought twenty or thirty days enough for this.
Now,certainly,if houses had been provided on purpose for those that were sound to perform this demi-quarantine in,they would have much less reason to think themselves injured in such a restraint than in being confined with infected people in the houses where they lived.
It is here,however,to be observed that after the funerals became so many that people could not toll the bell,mourn or weep,or wear black for one another,as they did before;no,nor so much as make coffins for those that died;so after a while the fury of the infection appeared to be so increased that,in short,they shut up no houses at all.It seemed enough that all the remedies of that kind had been used till they were found fruitless,and that the plague spread itself with an irresistible fury;so that as the fire the succeeding year spread itself,and burned with such violence that the citizens,in despair,gave over their endeavours to extinguish it,so in the plague it came at last to such violence that the people sat still looking at one another,and seemed quite abandoned to despair;whole streets seemed to be desolated,and not to be shut up only,but to be emptied of their inhabitants;doors were left open,windows stood shattering with the wind in empty houses for want of people to shut them.In a word,people began to give up themselves to their fears and to think that all regulations and methods were in vain,and that there was nothing to be hoped for but an universal desolation;and it was even in the height of this general despair that it Pleased God to stay His hand,and to slacken the fury of the contagion in such a manner as was even surprising,like its beginning,and demonstrated it to be His own particular hand,and that above,if not without the agency of means,as I shall take notice of in its proper place.
But I must still speak of the plague as in its height,raging even to desolation,and the people under the most dreadful consternation,even,as I have said,to despair.It is hardly credible to what excess the passions of men carried them in this extremity of the distemper,and this part,I think,was as moving as the rest.What could affect a man in his full power of reflection,and what could make deeper impressions on the soul,than to see a man almost naked,and got out of his house,or perhaps out of his bed,into the street,come out of Harrow Alley,a populous conjunction or collection of alleys,courts,and passages in the Butcher Row in Whitechappel,-I say,what could be more affecting than to see this poor man come out into the open street,run dancing and singing and making a thousand antic gestures,with five or six women and children running after him,crying and calling upon him for the Lord's sake to come back,and entreating the help of others to bring him back,but all in vain,nobody daring to lay a hand upon him or to come near him?
This was a most grievous and afflicting thing to me,who saw it all from my own windows;for all this while the poor afflicted man was,as I observed it,even then in the utmost agony of pain,having (as they said)two swellings upon him which could not be brought to break or to suppurate;but,by laying strong caustics on them,the surgeons had,it seems,hopes to break them -which caustics were then upon him,burning his flesh as with a hot iron.I cannot say what became of this poor man,but I think he continued roving about in that manner till he fell down and died.
