“The necessary remedies were employed to combat the disease. I prescribed especially salicylic acid, muriatic acid, quinine, &c., but everything proved useless. Not a single patient recovered, viz. Dr Koch and six of his assistants died, the priest of the Stanitza, the Cossacks employed in burying the dead; in a word, all those who approached the persons attacked with the disease, although furnished with the means of preservation used in like circumstances, very few escaped the plague.[112]”

[112] ‘Lancet.’

No case of plague has occurred in England for more than two centuries, although in 1721 it half depopulated Marseilles, and committed fearful ravages at Moscow, in 1771.

Within the present century it has appeared in Europe at the following places:—At Malta, in 1813; at Calabria, in 1816; at Corfu, in 1818; in Silesia, in 1819; and amongst the Russian troops in Bulgaria, in 1824. In Malta between 4000 and 5000 people fell victims to it.

It made its last appearance in England in 1665, and was especially fatal in London, where it carried off, as we have already seen, 65,596 people. Because of the frightful mortality it occasioned, this particular outbreak of the disease has been named by historians “The Great Plague of London.” Rapidly spreading from Westminster, where it first manifested itself, to the more closely built city, its progress increased with the warm weather, until during the sultry months of August and September it reached its height. “Thus,” writes Pepys in his diary, August 31st, 1665 “this month ends with great sadness upon the public through the greatness of the plague everywhere through the kingdom almost. Every day sadder and sadder news of its increase. In the city died this week 7496, and of them 6102 of the plague. But it is feared the true number of the dead this week is near 10,000; partly from the poor that cannot be taken notice of through the greatness of the number, and partly through the

Quakers and others that will not have the bell ring for them.” The general aspect of the pestilence stricken city is thus described by Pepys, “To the Exchange, where I have not been a great while. But, Lord! how sad a sight it is to see the streets empty of people and very few upon the ‘Change. Jealous of every door that one sees shut up, lest it should be plague; and about us two shops in three, if not generally more, shut up.”

The doors of a house infected with the plague were marked with a red cross, and on them was written the words, “The Lord have mercy upon us.” Pepys tells of the fright he experienced when he came upon two houses of this description, in Drury-lane, for the first time; and as he adds that he was compelled to buy some roll tobacco to smell and to chew, it may be concluded that this substance was at that time regarded as somewhat of a safeguard against the disease.

Large carts called nightly at the infected habitations and collecting the bodies of any dead conveyed them to pits, into which they were flung, covered with quicklime. This rude kind of burial became a necessity as the disease gained ground, because the ordinary grave-yards were full to overflowing. “This is the first time,” writes Pepys, “since I have been in the church since I left London for the plague, and it frightened me indeed to go through the church more than I thought it could have done, to see so many graves lie so high upon the churchyards where people have been buried of the plague.”

Such was the fury of the pestilence, and frequently so sudden were its attacks, that wayfarers were often assailed with it in the streets, and staggering like drunken men fell down into the road or pathways insensible or dead. Merchants in their counting-houses, clergymen in the act of reading the burial service, buyers and sellers in the market-place, were similarly assailed by the malignant malady, and it was no uncommon occurrence for the mourner at the grave of a relative or friend one day, to be himself borne to his own tomb the next. It is not improbable the infection may have been conveyed by the rapidly decaying and putrid corpse to large numbers of people, owing to the custom that prevailed of crowds of mourners attending the obsequies.

Pepys records how he saw in broad daylight two or three burials, one at the very heels of another, each followed by forty or fifty people. Furthermore, he states that one day on his way to Greenwich, during the month of August in 1665, he passed a coffin, “with a dead body therein, dead of the plague, lying in an open close belonging to Coombe Farm.”