DANIEL DEFOE ON THE DEPLORABLE EFFECT OF THE GREAT LONDON PLAGUE OF 1665 ON WOMEN WITH CHILD

Abstract

Daniel Defoe (c. 1659-1731) in his graphic pseudo-historical journal, published in 1722, concerning London in the year of the Great Plague of 1665, vividly described with intensely human characters, ordinary people caught in a terrible tragedy they could scarcely comprehend. An example is his description of the pitiable state of women in labor during the calamitous year of the plague.1 ... Let me first mention that one of the most deplorable cases in all the present calamity was that of women with child, who, when they came to the hour of their sorrows and their pains came upon them, could neither have help of one kind or another, neither midwife or neighbouring women to come near them. Most of the midwives were dead, especially of such as served the poor; and many, if not all the midwives of note, were fled into the country; so that it was next to impossible for a poor woman that could not pay an immoderate price to get any midwife to come to her, and if they did, those they could get were generally unskillful and ignorant creatures; and the consequence of this was that a most unusual and incredible number of women were reduced to the utmost distress. Some were delivered and spoiled by the rashness and ignorance of those who pretended to lay them. Children without number were, I might say, murthered by the same, but a more justifiable ignorance, pretending they would save the mother, whatever became of the child; and many times both mother and child were lost in the same manner; and especially where the mother had the distemper, there nobody would come near them, and both sometimes perished. Sometimes the mother has died of the plague, and the infant, it may be, half born, or born but not parted from the mother.