66 • Beginningswere about to do the same with a second fatality, though this time the inter-
ment would be in private, in the churchyard, not in the sanctuary surrounded
by family and friends of the departed.
Given that buboes occasionally didn’t come out until after death, it was
hard to blame a searcher for not reporting plague after viewing a corpse
without that sign. Word was spreading that the nurses whom parishes hired
to care for shut-up families were covering the warm bodies of newly de-
ceased persons with a blanket to keep the tokens from coming out. This
saved the nurses from being shut up in the infected house with the rest of the
household for the obligatory forty-day quarantine.^24
The searchers were pressured from all directions. Who except for coura-
geous public-minded persons like Dr. Burnet would rush to have their house
shut up or admit there was plague on their street? A poor searcher entering a
dark alley and approaching a grief-stricken household could anticipate pleas,
sometimes accompanied with money, not to report the fatality as plague.
Neighbors naturally wished to avoid having the neighborhood labeled as
plague ridden, with the accompanying associations of immoral, sluttish be-
havior that people said bred the disease. The leading newsletter publisher in
the city, Roger L’Estrange, catered to this sort of denial by continuing to re-
port the usual court and city news and gossip and asserting that plague did
not come to the better neighborhoods.
Dissembling and inaccurate reporting did not fool the doctors. Spotted
fever and other ailments suddenly became a very popular cause of death. But
spotted fever did not carry off the high number of victims that plague did. “I
had many patients of [spotted fever],” Boghurst later recalled, “but few
dyed.” Likewise, fatalities from tissick and consumption had occurred last
winter, as normal for the season. But this year they were reported in increas-
ing numbers as the weather warmed up, which did not make sense to med-
ical authorities. Convulsions and dropsy were not prone to the epidemic gy-
rations and greatly increased mortality being reported for them. And death
from disorders of the stomach and intestines usually formed a gently rising
curve to plateau in the summer, yet the Bills of Mortality recorded a much
earlier increase this year in deaths from “griping in the guts,” “stopping of the
stomach,” and “surfeit” (overeating).^25
There was one group of related causes of death in the Bills of Mortality
whose soaring figures could not be attributed to false or inattentive report-
ing. Pregnant women and the fetuses they were carrying were always at great
risk. In a plague epidemic, pregnant women were probably more vulnerable
than any other group.^26 A poor pregnant woman increased her exposure to