Notes to Pages 56–61• 313- CLRO CC 46 , fol. 59 ; BL, Addit. MSS 4182 (newsletters), fol. 15 ; Bell,The Great
Plague, 23. - CLRO CC 46 , fol. 60.
Chapter 3. Signs and Sources
- Boghurst,Loimographia, 19.
- George Wither was typical. He wrote two dramatic representations of the Great
Plague of 1625 ,History of the Pestilence( 1625 ) and Britains Remembrancer( 1628 ), and re-
turned to the theme while in residence during the 1665 epidemic with A Memorandum
to London, Occasioned by the Pestilence there begun this present year(London, 1665 ). - John Quarles,The Citizens Flight(London, 1665 ).
- Pepys,Diary, 10 : 49.
- Boghurst,Loimographia, 27.
- The statistics come from London’s Dreadful Visitation.
- On fever as symptom, see Don G. Bates, “Thomas Willis and the Fevers Litera-
ture of the Seventeenth Century,” in W. F. Bynum and V. Nutton, eds.,Theories of Fever
from Antiquity to the Enlightenment(Medical History,suppl. 1 ) (London, 1981 ), 45 – 70.
On the identification of spotted fever during this time, we thank Andrew Wear. - The figures come from Ian Sutherland, “A Summary Tabulation of Annual Totals
of Burials, Plague Deaths, and Christenings in London Prior to 1666 ,” typescript
(Medical Research Council Statistical Research and Service Unit, London, 1972 ,rev.
1986 ), 20 – 21.
9 .On Garencières, see Wear,Knowledge and Practice, 295. - Historians of medicine disagree on the originality of early modern observations
of plague. Nancy Siraisi suggests wholesale copying of earlier texts, as it was “more ac-
ceptable to stretch existing categories of disease to encompass plague (often assimilat-
ing it to various types of fever) than to allow for the existence of a disease not described
in authoritative medical textbooks and not susceptible of rational explanation.” Biraben
argues for greater firsthand knowledge: “First of all, let us be very precise in saying that
the specificity of the illness was recognized everywhere ...From the fifteenth to the
seventeenth century, when people spoke of plague, they knew what they were talking
about and did not confuse it with any other complaint.” Regrettably, he divides his de-
scription of plague into two, a modern clinical discussion and a culling of historical ac-
counts spread over the long history of the disease, so it is difficult to see how specifically
firsthand the analyses were for any single epidemic. Nancy Siraisi,Medieval and Renais-
sance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice(Chicago, 1990 ), 128 ; Biraben,
Les hommes et la peste, 2 : 41.
For the Great Plague of London in 1665 , there is little analysis of medical observations
beyond the brief descriptive chapter, “The Plague of 1665 in Literature,” in Mullett,The
Bubonic Plague and England, 223 – 50. Bell,The Great Plague, 340 , calls the medical litera-
ture “small.” Slack,The Impact of Plague, 244 , finds the number of plague tracts in 1665
impressive by comparison with earlier epidemics, with almost two-thirds of the forty-six
treatises focusing on medical information as opposed to the religious focus in the others.