70 • BeginningsAccepting God’s right and power to strike down anyone, good or bad,
young or old, rich or poor, several writers proceeded to discuss the possible
natural causes through which He was inflicting this misery. Richard Kephale
put down a dizzying list of “sources,” from surfeit and rotten mutton in Lon-
don’s pestered suburbs to a pack of carpets from Turkey and a dog from Am-
sterdam.^34 William Boghurst listed the movement of comets through the
sky, changes in the weather, and children “aping at funerals.” These random
approaches suggest that their authors were cribbing creatively from earlier
plague tracts, with a few personal observations thrown in for good measure.
“Swarms of ants covered the highways,” Boghurst remembered; there was
a “multitude of croaking frogs” and flies lining the sides of houses “like a rope
of onions.” Boghurst’s reading took him back to a biblical plague unleashed
on Pharaoh’s Egypt: it had been preceded by a strange alteration of the water
supply, unusual hail, murrain in cattle, and an attack of locusts. He then
noted the eerie absence of swallows in London in 1664 , which continued into
the present year. And there were strong winds blowing from the heart of the
city to the western suburbs as the plague came in. The suburban apothecary’s
mental meandering coincided remarkably with Reverend Patrick’s reaction
on hearing that many birds died just before the epidemic. He scanned his
reference books and found the explanation: “These airey creatures feele the
alteration in [the air] sooner than wee.”^35
There was one common element in all this probing—miasmatic air. It was
both a prime conveyer of the infection and the product of such things as con-
taminated soil, the motion of the planets, or even earthquakes. The ancient
medical authority Galen had defined plague to be “nothing else but changing
aire into a putrefying pestilent quality,” Boghurst recalled. “Miasmas” were
suspected of spreading the plague in the air, though the seeds or atoms were
invisible. “Contagion,” the other prime suspect, was a much more elusive
idea, for how could one come in contact with the infection? Still, it made
sense that the poison, however it was produced, could be passed from person
to person by touching or by breath, even from someone who had not yet
shown signs of the plague. Or the poison might be carried by dogs and cats,
or material, especially light-colored cloth (which was often found near a
stricken family).
Most often the miasmist and contagionist views were combined. Boghurst
nimbly wove these views together. He began with the winds blowing in mi-
asmatic poison. Especially susceptible to the miasmas were people who had
engaged in disorderly living, overeating, and excessive physical exertion (in-
cluding sex). Then the plague exploded, and Boghurst saw contagion as the