A.D. 1663, severe pestilence prevailed in England. The illustrious Sydenham graphically describes the various epidemic maladies which prevailed all over England from the year 1661 unto 1680. Inflammatory fevers and quinsies, he says, were more frequent in London than they were ever before known to be. During the summer of 1664, in the month of May, a comet was seen and a malignant fever prevailed, which could not in many cases be distinguished from the true plague; and in the month of June it became greatly aggravated. From the 2nd of November the true plague raged with violence, and continued with great mortality for eighteen months, unto May, 1666. Among the signs foreshowing the advent of the plague, it is said that birds, wild fowl, and wild beasts left their accustomed haunts, and but few swallows were seen. In the summer of 1664, there were such multitudes of flies, that the insides of houses swarmed with them; ants were generated in great numbers, and might have been taken up from the highways in handsful; the ditches were filled with frogs and various kinds of insects.
The plague was ushered in with seven months’ dry weather and westerly winds: it commenced on the highest parts of London, in the parish of St. Giles in the Fields, whence it extended rapidly to St. Martin’s, Westminster, Highgate, Hampstead, and Acton; all these parishes and villages were soon infected.
“The disease,” says Mr. Boghurst, a medical practitioner, who resided in the metropolis during the whole period of the prevalence of the disease, “spread not altogether by contagion at first, nor began only at one place, and spread farther and farther as an eating and spreading sore doth all over the body, but fell upon several places of the city and suburbs like rain even at the first,—as St. Giles’, St. Martin’s, Chancery Lane, Southwark, Houndsditch, and some places within the city, as at Proctors’ Houses.” Boghurst further states that “this year, 1665, in which the plague hath raged so much, no alteration nor change appeared in any element, vegetable or animal, besides the body of man, except only the season of the year and the winds; the spring being continually dry for six or seven months together, there being no rain at all, but a little sprinkling shower or two about the latter end of April, which caused a pitiful crop of hay in the spring: in the autumn there was a pretty good crop, but all other things were healthy and sound, and all sorts of fruits, such as apples, pears, cherries, plums, grapes, melons, cabbages, &c.; all roots, as parsnips, carrots, turnips; all flowers, and medicinal simples, were as plentiful, large, fair, and wholesome, and all grain as plentiful and as good as ever.” 68,596 persons are reported to have been carried off this year by the plague in London alone. A comet was seen in 1665, and an earthquake shook Oxford. Immediately after the great fire, on the 2nd September, 1666, which destroyed 13,200 houses, fatal dysentery was very prevalent. During this period, a plague infested the island of Malta; yellow pestilence, or fever, prevailed in the island of St. Domingo, as also in many other of the West Indian Islands; Holland and Prussia suffered from severe epidemic disease: and the year following, 1667, a miliary pestilence raged in Bavaria; Spain suffered from epidemic pestilence, from which no province escaped: it caused great mortality, and was rapidly fatal. Don Pedro Vasquez, a physician of Toledo, describes the symptoms as being those of quinsy, attended with malignant fever, in his work entitled ‘Morbi Essentia qui non solum per hanc insignem urbem Tolitanam, sed per totam Hispaniam sparsim grassatur, quem vulgus garratillo appellat, Apologetica Disceptatio; et ea quæ in curatione hujus morbi sunt animadvertenda.’
The same year, A.D. 1667, Salamanca and Lisbon suffered from pestilence. Yellow fever appeared in the United States of America in A.D. 1668, and was especially destructive in the cities of New York and Philadelphia; in the subsequent year, the inhabitants of Norway were visited by pestilence in the shape of malignant measles, which with small-pox was also rife in England. About this time, a terrible earthquake occurred at Naples, which destroyed great numbers of lives and houses in Benevento. The Archbishop was dug out of the ruins, and became afterwards Pope Benedict XIII.
A.D. 1670, gangrenous ergotism broke out in Aquitaine, in Sologne, and in the Galinois district; it continued until 1674, by which time it had extended to Montagris and the neighbourhood.
A.D. 1672, in the month of December, there fell in the West of England a shower of rain that froze into ice as soon as it touched the boughs of trees or anything above ground, and by the increase of size of the icicles, it broke all down with its weight. The ice on the sprig of an ash weighing three-quarters of a pound amounted to sixteen pounds. The rain that fell on the snow immediately became ice without sinking into the snow, so intensely cold was the weather. About this time, a strange phenomenon occurred; while the English were waiting for the flow of the tide, in order to land on the coast of Scheveling, they were disappointed; as the next tide flowed but two hours, when an ebb for many hours succeeded, which carried the English fleet again to sea before the return of the flow: the Hollanders were thus preserved from an invasion, as it were, by a miracle. In Spain, great sterility of the land and epidemic disease prevailed. In the month of May, the Council of One Hundred were informed that pestilence had broken out on the French frontiers. Miliary pestilence prevailed in Hungary; and in the early part of the year following, 1673, an epidemic of a violent character broke out in Spain, which continued until 1684; it was described by Valcarcel as being of a tertiary type. The disease was of a mild form in the months of May and June, but increased in malignancy in August, September, and October to such a degree that it destroyed nearly half the inhabitants of Barcelona.
A.D. 1675 and 1676, virulent small-pox and measles again broke out in England. In the former year (1675), 11,300 persons were carried off by plague in the island of Malta: a miliary epidemic was very fatal in Hamburgh, and, according to Escobar, the inhabitants of the city of Carthagena suffered from epidemic tertian fevers.
A.D. 1677, a comet was observed. Pestilence again broke out in Murcia and Carthagena; thousands died of small-pox in Charleston, Massachusetts, United States, and a plague desolated many parts of Europe. From this year until 1679, epidemic pestilence overspread Spain; and, according to the statements of several historians, the capitals of Granada, Cordova, and Seville suffered greatly.
A.D. 1678. A comet was observed this year also. An inundation occurred in Gascony, when the water spouted in jets from the sides of an adjacent mountain in overwhelming quantities. Plagues ravaged Algeria and Morocco.—The year following, mortal pestilence prevailed in Vienna, and in Malaga and other parts of Andalusia.
A.D. 1679, pestilence and famine were rife in Germany from June until the month of December the following year, 1680: two comets were observed. Dresden suffered from plague, and cholera prevailed in England.