6 • The Great Plagueabout the first pandemic, which had ravaged a wide area from the Mediter-
ranean to China a millennium before their time. Even if they knew about
Justinian’s Plague, its sparse written records could have told them little about
a disease over which modern epidemiologists continue to puzzle.^9 But lit-
erate men and women and many unlettered persons in 1665 certainly knew of
the terrifying Black Death that entered Europe from the East in 1347. Plague
tracts from the Black Death and its successor epidemics of the second plague
pandemic had passed on a wealth of information about the symptoms and
signs on victims’ bodies, the terrifying climb in mortality that peaked in the
hot summer months, and the erratic spread of the “infection” through a com-
munity. Most victims, it was said, bore the signature mark of a swelling on
the neck, under the arm, or in the area of the groin and thighs, the infamous
“buboes.” People searched for words to describe the horror of this disease.
Every new outbreak in England’s capital was called “the Great Plague of
London”—until the next one came along. English men and women called
the disease a variety of names:plague, pestilence, infection, distemper, contagion,
andvisitation.But most of all it was known simply as the sickness,because it
stood out from all other human ills.
Londoners in 1665 could not know that plague would never come back to
their city after their epidemic. Nor could they imagine that within a few gen-
erations it would disappear from continental Europe. Western Europe suf-
fered sporadic outbreaks well into the eighteenth century, most memorably
at Marseilles, on the Mediterranean coast of France, in 1720 – 22 (inspiring
Daniel Defoe’s literary imagining of the Great Plague of London,A Journal
of the Plague Year).^10 Thereafter, this second pandemic was confined to north-
ern Africa and a wide area of Asia, from the Turkish Ottoman Empire to
China, except for a few last sorties into eastern European lands, most spec-
tacularly at Moscow in 1770.
In the distant future lay a third plague pandemic. It began in China in the
1890 s, spread into Africa, and traveled by steamship to previously uninfected
North and South America in the twentieth century. Classification and diag-
nostic techniques had changed dramatically between 1665 and 1894 because
of the nineteenth-century microbial revolution, which traced the cause of in-
fectious illnesses to pathogenic microorganisms. The bacterial agent of the
third pandemic,Yersinia pestis,had probably also caused sickness and death
in 1665 , but definitive proof awaits future research. We will return to this sub-
ject after allowing our protagonists to recount their experiences with plague,
as they understood it.