The Great Plague. The Story of London\'s Most Deadly Year

xvi • Preface

ognition as a twin disaster with the Great Fire of London the following year,
and much about the Great Plague remains unexplored or incompletely re-

ported.
Human beings are compelled to make sense of catastrophes, whether they
arise from human frailty or natural causes. Alarmed by dire reports of 30 , 000
to 40 , 000 deaths from an earthquake in Portugal in 1755 , Voltaire wrote

plaintively:

Oh wretched man earth-fated to be cursed;

Abyss of plagues, and miseries the worst!^2

Our goal was to find out how people lived through one of these catastro-
phes, to explore the resources on which they drew. How did they resolve the
dilemma of whether to stay on at the risk of their lives or leave work and
home for an uncertain reception by country people frightened of catching

the plague from them? We wondered how those who stayed maintained a
semblance of normalcy in the midst of death, dearth, and disorder. Had they
received material help or discovered a wellspring of faith and endurance?
We have combined two professional backgrounds to explore these themes.

Dorothy was a microbiologist who worked in public health and university
laboratories and then taught in a medical magnet high school. She used a
historical perspective to teach developments in biology, especially microbiol-
ogy. Lloyd began as a political historian of seventeenth-century Europe and,

over time, was drawn into the new social and cultural history. After retiring
from teaching in 1993 , we set out to see what the archives and published
sources offered on the human side of the tragedy of the Great Plague. Profes-

sional friends offered encouragement and leads to out-of-the-way sources.
Friends who are specialists of neither history nor medicine added their own
enthusiasm for this undertaking. They found our subject timely and share a
concern about how we all might react if a similar threat reached our shores.

Today, as anxieties persist over the menace of AIDS, biological warfare,
and hemorrhagic fevers boiling up in Africa, the need to understand calam-
ity reemerges.^3 Our age has inherited a rather hazy vision of past epidemics.
The microbial revolution of the nineteenth century demystified infectious
diseases by anointing their causes with scientific names like “bacteria,” “pro-

tozoa,” and “virus.” Then antibiotics appeared, seemingly defending us as
with a magic bullet. We late moderns like to believe that our medically priv-
ileged society is walled off from the pestilential past.
Earlier societies lived with a vivid memory of past epidemic disasters

passed on through oral histories and reminders in prose, poetry, and vivid