I am, Sir
With due Respect,
Your most obliged,
Humble Servant,
R. Bradley.
PREFACE.
here would be little Occasion for a Preface to this Treatise, if the last Foreign Advices had not given us something particular relating to the Pestilence that now rages in the South Parts of France; and what may more particularly recommend these Relations to the World, is, because they come from Physicians, who resided at the Infected Places.
The Physician at Aix gives us the following Account.
The Contagious Distemper, which has become the Reproach of our Faculty here for above a Month past, is more violent than that at Marseilles; it breaks out in Carbuncles, Buboes, livid Blisters, and purple Spots; the first Symptoms are grievous Pains in the Head, Consternations, wild Looks, a trembling Voice, a cadaverous Face, a Coldness in all the extreme Parts, a low unequal Pulse, great Pains in the Stomach, Reachings to Vomit, and these are follow’d by Sleepiness, Deliriums, Convulsions, or Fluxes of Blood, the Forerunners of sudden Death. In the Bodies that are open’d, we find gangrenous Inflammations in all the lower Parts of the Belly, Breast and Neck. Above fifty Persons have died every Day for three Weeks past in the Town and Hospitals. Most of them fall into a dreadful Phrenzy, so that we are forc’d to tie them.
The other is a Letter from a Physician at Marseilles, sent to John Wheake, Esq; who was so kind to give me the Abstract.