In 1994 we attended a conference on contagious diseases at the
Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London (now the Well-
come Centre for the History of Medicine at University College, London). A
presenter questioned why people are drawn to writing about plague. She
guessed that they had a macabre fascination with a disease that “reads like a
gothic drama.” We could respond only that plague is the touchstone or tem-
plate for gothic drama. Anxiety, fear, horror—it’s all there. The writer has to
show great restraint not to describe the reality with purple prose. The quest
to understand how people coped then and now is compelling. What follows
is the story of a plague epidemic and of individual responses to it.
Our interest in plague goes back to the 1980 s, when Dorothy was re-
searching the reemergence of old diseases and the appearance of new dis-
eases in the greater Los Angeles area. In 1981 , public health authorities in
New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco were challenged by case after
case of an illness with a wide range of symptoms and an unknown cause.
Later that year the syndrome was identified as an immune deficiency disease,
AIDS. That same year, in one of the outer suburbs of Los Angeles, an epi-
demic broke out among squirrels. This was an enzootic of plague, once the
most dreaded disease of humans. Dorothy went to the area to talk with offi-
cials in charge of eradicating the disease from the animal population and
preventing it from transferring to humans. This inspired her to study two
short-lived epidemics of plague among early-twentieth-century residents of
Los Angeles and San Francisco. (The latter outbreak, which infected 280
persons and resulted in 172 fatalities, has been chronicled by Marilyn Chase
inThe Barbary Plague.)^1
Lloyd joined in to research far more serious epidemic outbreaks. Initially,
we envisaged a multidisease study, beginning with the Black Death in the
fourteenth century and ending with AIDS in the twentieth century. A pub-
lisher friend, Keith Ashfield, suggested that we write on a specific epidemic
of one disease: “Why not the Great Plague of London in 1665 ?” The sugges-
tion was challenging and exciting. The Great Plague of 1665 has instant rec-
[xv]PREFACE