Epilogue• 271Vienna, Budapest, and Prague with massive mortality, causing grateful survi-
vors to erect votive monuments and altars. In 1710 a deeper incursion struck
the Baltic seaports, a major source of the English navy’s building materials.
“We are terribly afraid of the plague,” wrote the great English satirist Jona-
than Swift. Daniel Defoe reprinted the terrible Bill of Mortality of Sep-
tember 12 – 19 , 1665 , to remind Londoners of what might happen to them.^12
Then in 1720 plague struck the major French port of Marseilles on the Med-
iterranean, causing consternation on the Thames because the two cities were
linked through continuous shipping. Nathaniel Hodges’Loimologiawas
translated from Latin to English. His companion piece,A Letter to a Person of
Quality,joined other sources from 1665 inA Collection of Very Valuable and
Scarce Pieces Relating to the Last Plague.One self-appointed authority tried to
calm his readers by reminding them that in 1665 plague “did not reach those
who smoak’d tobacco every day.”^13
Defoe’s popular Journal of the Plague Yearof 1722 kept popping up in Lon-
don’s bookstalls for decades with slight changes to title and text to look like a
new work.^14 Every once in a while, a brand new tract on this ancient disease
reached the booksellers of Saint Paul’s churchyard.^15 There was obviously a
market for the subject. While the disease stayed away from Western Europe
after the Marseilles visitation, it struck repeatedly at southern Russia from
Persia in the 1720 s and 1730 s. Then in 1770 plague slipped past a Russian im-
perial quarantine, killing 100 , 000 persons around Moscow. That epidemic
lasted three years—the equivalent of the Great Plague of London—and de-
fied the wisdom of the Russian medical profession.^16 The inhabitants of the
British Isles and Western Europe had good reason to wonder whether they
could rely on the cordon sanitaireof guards that the Austro-Hungarian Em-
pire was now posting against the entry of infected goods and persons from
the Turkish lands. Every outbreak in Europe and beyond caused the English
authorities to quarantine ships from suspect sources, hoping this would keep
the poison out.
The Industrial Revolution, which began around 1760 and continued for
seventy years, contributed to unsanitary working and living conditions and
gave new meaning to the old idea of “miasmas.” Rapid modes of transport
made communities all the more fearful of “contagious” goods and passengers.
By 1846 the London presses made a point of publicizing the findings of the
French Academy of Medicine on the difficulties of sealing Europe off from
plague in Asia.^17 But quarantine was England’s only obvious defense.
Meanwhile, a mysterious new infective disease entered the Russian Em-
pire from India in 1829. Soon Asiatic cholera became the great killer-disease