Celestial portents were not lacking to presage the plague. A blazing comet appeared for several months before the plague. Men affected to see, in its dull colour and slow solemn movement, a prediction of the heavy punishment of pestilence; whereas that which preceded the fire was swift and flaming and foretold a rapid retribution.
Superstition raked up images afresh from the scrap-heap of discarded fancies. Women saw flaming swords in the heavens, some even saw angels brandishing them over their heads. Astrologers had strange tales of malignant conjunctions of the planets. Medical opinion was still divided along the same lines of cleavage, as it had been for 2,000 years before. There were those who referred the disease to some occult poison, and those who referred it to an excess of some manifest quality, such as heat, or cold, or moisture, in each case corrupting the body humours. Speculation was rife as to the nature of the causal poison. Some, as Lucretius had done, conceived it to be pestiferous corpuscles of atomic character, outside the range of human vision, generated either in the heavens by a malignant conjunction of planets, or in the soil, and so often liberated by the agency of earthquakes. These poisons, however generated, found their way into the human body through the medium of the distempered atmosphere.
Some had noticed an unusual absence of birds before the epidemic, as Thucydides and Livy had done in their times. Boyle observed a great diminution of flies in 1665, Boghurst a superabundance of flies and ants in 1664. Sir George Ent and others attributed the disease to minute invisible insects, but Blackmore conceived these to be rather a consequence than a cause.
Insects, so-called, had been vaguely associated with pestilence from remote antiquity, more especially flies, lice, and locusts; but in the medical literature of the sixteenth century and after they are assigned a much more definite role. Mercurialis[182] states that huge numbers of caterpillars paraded the streets of Venice during the plague of 1576. Goclenus[183] mentions swarms of spiders during the plague of Hesse in 1612, and Hildanus swarms of flies and caterpillars this same year in plague-stricken Lausanne. Bacon speaks of flies and locusts, as characteristic of pestilential years, and Diemerbroeck[184] of flies, gnats, butterflies, beetles, grasshoppers, and hornets in the same connexion. Gottwald[185] reported the presence of multitudes of spiders during the plague of Dantzig in 1709. Arabian physicians considered the putrefaction of swarms of dead locusts an important cause of pestilence. Hancock,[186] as late as 1821, argued that locusts caused famine by destroying the crops, and so prepared the way for human pestilence.
Talismans, amulets, reliquaries, and all the stock-in-trade of magic were in brisk demand among the populace. Quack vendors of antipestilential remedies innumerable effectively replaced physicians, most of whom took refuge in flight. All honour to those who stood fast at their posts and reclaimed for medicine what Galen had renounced, the captaincy of its own soul. These are the men who had no fear for ‘the pestilence that walketh in darkness or the arrow that flieth by day’:
| 1. | Dr. Francis Glisson |  | Presidents of the Royal College |
| 2. | Sir Thomas Witherley | of Physicians. | |
| 3. | Dr. Nicholas Davys |  | |
| 4. | Dr. Edward Deantry | ||
| 5. | Dr. Thomas Allen | ||
| 6. | Sir John Baber | ||
| 7. | Dr. Peter Barwick | ||
| 8. | Dr. Humphrey Brooks | Fellows of the Royal College | |
| 9. | Dr. Alexander Burnett | of Physicians. | |
| 10. | Dr. Elisha Coysh | ||
| 11. | Dr. John Glover | ||
| 12. | Dr. Nathaniel Hodges | ||
| 13. | Dr. Nathan Paget | ||
| 14. | Dr. Thomas Wharton | ||
| 15. | Dr. William Conyers | Member of the Royal College | |
| of Physicians. | |||
| 16. | Dr. O’Dowd | ||
| 17. | Dr. Samuel Peck | ||
| 18. | John Fife |  | |
| 19. | Thomas Gray | Members of Barber-Surgeons’ | |
| 20. | Edward Hannan | Company. | |
| 21. | Edward Higgs | ||
And yet a few beside these, whose names are inscribed on no human document, but whose deeds are imprinted in imperishable type on the deathless record of righteous human endeavour.
Nathaniel Hodges[187] shows us something of the daily life of a physician in the course of this plague. He himself rose early, took his antipestilential dose, attended to the affairs of his household, and then repaired to his consulting room, where crowds awaited him. Some, who were sick, he treated, others he reassured and sent away. Breakfast followed, then visits to patients at their homes. On entering a house he would vaporize some aromatic disinfectant on a charcoal brazier: if he arrived out of breath, he would rest a while, and then place a lozenge in his mouth, before proceeding to the examination of his patients. After a round of several hours’ duration, he would return home, drink a glass of sack, and then dine on roast meat and pickles or some similar condiments, all of which were reputed antidotal. More wine followed the preliminary curtain-raiser. Afternoon and evening, till eight or nine o’clock, were devoted to a second round of visits. His late hours he spent at home, a stranger to noxious fumes of tobacco, quaffing sack, to ensure cheerfulness and certainty of sleep. Twice the fatal infection seemed to have slipped past his outposts, but Hodges had still his remedy: he merely doubled the dose.
Of all the literature of pestilence none has been more widely read than Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year: all later records take their colour from Defoe. Nevertheless, a careful study and comparison of other contemporary accounts leaves little room for doubt that Defoe’s picture does not accurately represent the general state of London during the plague. His picture is far more true of Marseilles in 1720 than of London in 1665, and in this connexion one should remember that he had sedulously collected materials for a diary of the plague of Marseilles, which have been printed in some editions of his works. These can hardly have failed to colour his Journal, which was not submitted to the public till 1722, two years after the plague of Marseilles.
Defoe himself was but six years old at the time of the plague, so that his own childish memories can have aided him but little in his task. He will have had, at most, a dim recollection of some hideous catastrophe, round which ranged tales of parents and friends in his boyhood. To these he will have added facts and incidents borrowed from the chief records available in print. Intrinsic evidence goes to show that these were three: London’s Dreadful Visitation, Hodges’s Loimologia, and Vincent’s God’s Terrible Voice in the City. The first of these will have given him the Bills of Mortality and other general information: the second, the aspect of the plague from a physician’s point of view: the third, a vision of the plague as it appealed to popular imagination.