Signs and Sources • 71main vehicle for spreading the infection. Like many others, he knew to pro-
tect himself against miasmatic air and equally to avoid persons carrying the
infection, especially vagrants and beggars. In addition to closing windows
and fumigating rooms, the shutting up of infected houses would be primary
strategies against London’s raging epidemic.^36
The most ingenious blending of miasmist and contagionist ideas emerged
from Europe’s battle, during the previous century, with the new disease of
syphilis. What could explain this fast-spreading disease new to Europeans?
A brilliant Italian medical observer thought he had an answer. Girolamo
Fracastoro saw promise in an idea, propounded by some ancient authorities,
that the world was composed of invisible atoms. He suggested that individ-
ual diseases had atomlike seedlets, or seminaria,as he called them. Syphilis
fit the theory perfectly; Fracastoro could imagine its seedlets flying through
the air like miasmas and then becoming dormant for a long period before re-
emerging or vanishing. While these seminaria remained in the atmosphere,
they would pass contagiously from person to person until they gradually died
out in people’s bodies.^37
A decade after Fracastoro proposed his grand theory, a great plague epi-
demic broke out in Venice, and doctors familiar with his theory started talking
of plague-specific seminaria. The idea entered London’s medical vocabulary,
pushing the frontier of medicine to its outermost edge as the Great Plague
unfolded. “The seeds of the pestilence,” Boghurst wrote, “are so hidden and
removed from [our] senses that we can [only] perceive their effects.”^38
These plague seminaria were more plausible and far more frightening to
imagine than were conventional miasmas and contagion. They flew great
distances through the air. They spread from person to person. They could
even pass indirectly from contaminated objects. They might be produced by
celestial or atmospheric alterations. Ultimately, they were traceable to God,
the creator of everything from seminaria to their human prey.^39
Was there no avoiding them? Symon Patrick’s wealthy parishioners on the
Piazza and others with itchy feet and a large purse suspected that all expert
wisdom on the sources and signs of this grotesque killer added up to one
conclusion. The adage from past plague epidemics put it most succinctly and
convincingly: “Go early; stay far away; return late.” But what were persons to
do who had the resources to leave, yet hesitated out of moral and practical
concerns? And what of those lower on the economic ladder, who faced the
dilemma of staying and facing possible death or fleeing to unfamiliar places
without friends to receive them or the wherewithal to enter an inn? Could
they leave and should they leave?