Plague Of London Research Articles

William Winstanley’s Pestilential Poesies in The Christians Refuge: Or Heavenly Antidotes Against the Plague in this Time of Generall Contagion to Which is Added the Charitable Physician (1665)

During the Great Plague of London (1665), William Winstanley veered from his better known roles as arbiter of success and failure in his works of biography or as a comic author under the pseudonym Poor Robin, and instead engaged with his reading audience as a plague writer in the rare book The Christians Refuge: Or Heavenly Antidotes Against the Plague in this Time of Generall Contagion to Which is Added the Charitable Physician (1665). From its extensive paratexts, including a table of mortality statistics and woodcut of king death, to its temporal and providential interpretation of the disease between the covers of a single text, The Christians Refuge is a compendium of contemporary understanding of plague. This article addresses The Christians Refuge as an expression of London's print marketplace in a moment of transformation precipitated by the epidemic. The author considers the paratextual elements in The Christians Refuge that engage with the presiding norms in plague writing and publishing in 1665 and also explores how Winstanley's authorship is expressed in the work. Winstanley has long been seen as a biographer or as a humour writer; attributing The Christians Refuge extends and challenges previous perceptions of his work.

WRITE UP YOUR DEAD

Long before they were analyzed by demographers, the London bills of mortality circulated among the public, shaping the way people in the seventeenth century understood the geography of the city, the spread of disease, and the passage of time. Focusing on their role during the London plague of 1665, this article examines how the bills of mortality were produced, distributed, and interpreted. Reconstructing this process reveals how the reporting of the epidemic depended upon the collective efforts of hundreds of individuals acting at the local parish level. For better and for worse, the bills of mortality were collaborative texts that fed back into the collective behavior of the community.

Writing the Plague: William Austin's Epiloimia Epe, or, the Anatomy of the Pestilence (1666) and the Crisis of Early Modern Representation

The Great Plague of London (1665) brought the city to a halt. To the percussive rattle of dead-carts trundling through the city's streets to collect those who had succumbed to the illness, citizens conducted their lives around an epidemic that would kill between 75,000 and 100,000 Londoners. In tandem with the onslaught of plague, an epidemic of printed material spread through London's streets, commenting on and contextualizing the outbreak. The Great Plague of London provided more opportunities to share information through print than any previous outbreak. In his poem Epiloimia Epe, or, the Anatomy of the Pestilence (1666), William Austin relates his story of the outbreak while interrogating two aspects of print culture: first, print's capacity to convey truth and humanity during the stressful event of plague and, secondly, the medium's meaning to a seventeenth-century English author. This article argues that Austin's apprehension over the print medium is felt in two distinct ways throughout his lengthy poem: in the conflict he expresses over writing specifically for print and in his exposé of nefarious printing ventures that flourished during the epidemic. In his effort to capture the plague within the confines of a book, Austin finds himself torn between the medium he uses to carry his message forward and its insufficiency to convey the complexity of a city in disorder during plague times.

Infection, Media, and Capitalism: From Early Modern Plagues to Postmodern Zombies

This essay examines the shift in fictional representations of plague and viral infection in relation to technological, medial, and economic developments. Ben Jonson's play The Alchemist and Daniel Defoe's novel A Journal of the Plague Year revolve around historical visitations of plague in London. This study takes London as its constant variable; the city governs our choice of texts. They negotiate anxieties of the early modern era as mercantilism gives way to the process of accumulation tied to the developing free market as theorized by classical political economy. Two recent motion pictures, set during fictional London outbreaks, display a similar preoccupation with transforming economic spaces. In these texts, however, the relatively young figure of the viral zombie stands in place of and performs a function similar to the more venerable plague. Shaun of the Dead and 28 Days Later both serve as vehicles for expression of the ever-accelerating viral nature of global capitalism. By adopting a transhistorical approach, we demonstrate the relationship between media and plague that emerges, as the fact of infection generates not only a surrounding rhetoric of plague but also a veritable plague of rhetorics. In keeping with recent plague scholarship, this approach emphasizes the close kinship between plague and textuality by treating plague as a text to be read on the individual and political body and the structure of plague writing itself as a mirror of its subject, proliferating with a serial contagiousness.

Editorial [Hot Topic: In Silico (Guest Editor: Alexandre G. de Brevern)

Coming from Crimea, the Black Death spread to Western Europe and North Africa during the 1340s. From 1346 to 1352, the plague killed an estimated 25–40% of Europeans of all age-groups [1], i.e. 30 to 60% of Europe population. One of the earliest and most widely accepted explanations was that God was punishing humanity for their sins. One remedy for the curse was to do penitence. Thus in 1348 there rapidly arose a mass movement of flagellation [2]. In fact flagellation could not really help against such threat. The Black Death or Bubonic plague is caused by Yersinia pestis, a Eubacteria discovered in 1894 by Alexandre Yersin. It is transmitted by the bite of the flea Xenopsylla cheopsis. This flea lives by feeding the blood of many species besides man but its most preferred relationship is with the black rat (Rattus rattus). Fossilized remains of the plague flea have been found in large numbers in Amarna, Egypt [3, 4] about 1350 BC, and thus could be directly linked to the events described in the Book of Samuel [5, 6]. During the epidemic of Bubonic plague in London in 1665–1666, the known treatments were made use of, e.g. the so-famous Theriac or Venice Treacle which is used from the time of ancient Rome as a remedy against poison [7]. Since then, more specialized and novel treatments have been developed. However, since the characterization of Yersinia pestis, numerous drugs have been developed against it, e.g. gentamicin or doxycycline [8].. These researches had been carried out using more elaborated biochemical, biophysical and biological approaches.

The Printed Image in Early Modern London: Urban Space, Visual Representation, and Social Exchange by Joseph Monteyne

237 JOSEPH MONTEYNE. The Printed Image in Early Modern London: Urban Space, Visual Representation, and Social Exchange . Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Pp. xvi ⫹286. $124.95. ‘‘Early Modern’’ in the title must be understood to mean that The Printed Image in Early Modern London examines printed images at one brief period in that epoch and not across the entire age: the book concentrates on London during the Restoration. Methodologically fresh and theoretically informed, it complements Anthony Griffith’s Print in Stuart Britain and Sheila O’Connell’s Popular Print in England 1550–1850 (not mentioned), as well as my own work on ephemeral images of transient people. It espouses prints created for what I would call a mass audience; the less expensive printed objects that ‘‘decorated coffee-houses and taverns’’ were ‘‘used’’ rather than ‘‘collected.’’ These images are distinct from those created for elite collectors and popular viewers —Hogarth’s Invasion: France and England was aimed at a mass audience, but his Harlot’s Progress was done for both elite and popular classes, two groups that are quite different but not easy to separate because they share some tastes and proclivities, but not others . More needs to be thought about the distinction between elite, popular, and mass consumers of graphic art. Though sometimes jargonistic, The Printed Image is sharply focused, examining how ‘‘appropriations and representations of space negotiated the boundaries of the social and political world of early modern Londoners, challenging an older subjectivity and more traditional forms of order that the restoration of monarchical rule struggled to reassert.’’ It looks at how prints depicted and propagandized threats to the flow of life in restoration London; Mr. Monteyne ’s book views images as interventions , polemics, reflections on, and politicized statements about, events from the apocalyptic to the festive. Though disruptive, some effects were cataclysmic ; others, carnivalesque or festive. The exception is the so-called ‘‘solemn mock progression of the pope,’’ in which an effigy of the pontiff, after being carried through the streets of the city, was ceremonially burned in a bonfire . More congruent with coffee houses, this event does not fit with the Great Fire, the Great Plague, and Frost Fair. Though carnivalesque, the evidence of its importance and even its occurrence (as Roger North describes it) is not entirely convincing. But this is a small matter in a book otherwise rich and rewarding . At the apocalyptic end of the spectrum of events, Mr. Monteyne looks at how images published in London represented the bubonic plague of 1665. His interest is chiefly in broadsides, such as John Dunstall and John Sellers’s Scenes of the Plague in London with Statistical Breakdown by Parish for the Years 1625, 1636, and 1665. Sheets like this are examples of a distinctive seventeenth -century genre providing an account of the city and the social practices of its inhabitants; they invite an examination of the link between print culture and urban movements and spaces as the social order broke down. But Mr. Monteyne examines the title pages and also the texts of Thomas Dekker’s A Rod for Run-awayes and Henry Petowe ’s The Countrie Ague: or London her Welcome Home to her Retired Chil- 238 dren. To definitively explore the most vital of contemporary issues raised by the plague, he unearths matters not fully broached before, scrutinizing, in depth, flight from and return to the city, the treatment of removed Londoners in the country, and the establishment and function of pesthouses. Writing about an equally apocalyptic event, Mr. Monteyne looks at how the London fire of 1666 threatened the identity and autonomy of the city and how this threat was mapped literally in contemporary cartography. After treating paintings of the city in flames by AngloDutch artists, he devotes most energy to maps of London by Wenceslaus Hollar and others. The Great Fire, like the Great Plague, created conflicts between the city center and its periphery that were visibly reflected in the art and literature . Prints and maps of the fire, which contrasted the glorious ‘‘before’’ with the dreadful ‘‘after,’’ ‘‘generated new visual conceptions of the city and urban space that foreshadowed the disappearance of an older London.’’ As well as foreshadowing, these widely...

A Lloyd Moote and Dorothy C Moote, The great plague: the story of London's most deadly year, Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004, pp. xxi, 357, illus., £19.95 (hardback 0-8018-7783-0), £12.50 (paperback 0-8018-8493-4).

The London plague epidemic of 1665 occupies an unusually prominent place in disease history, and for that reason alone the revisiting of its sources undertaken by A Lloyd Moote and Dorothy C Moote is welcome. The authors hope to recreate a narrative picture of individual experiences and responses to a cataclysm that may have taken 100,000 lives, and they have produced a readable and reasonable account that should now be the first choice of readers who want to know the story. The narrative is structured around several individuals who left extensive accounts of their own experiences: the apothecary William Boghurst, the physician Nathaniel Hodges, the clergyman Symon Patrick, the bureaucrat Samuel Pepys, and the merchant William Turner. Also contributing are the gentleman John Evelyn, the Southwark medical practitioner and preacher John Allin, the Essex clergyman Ralph Josselin, Lucy Hastings (Lady Huntingdon), and her London agent Gervase Jacques. The authors, well aware that such testimony represents only the successful minority, must allow poorer London to speak collectively, relying particularly on records from such stricken parishes as St Giles’ Cripplegate, St Margaret's Westminster, and St Botolph's Bishopsgate. Vivid details from the sources bring home the realities of the epidemic: powdered unicorn horns as a cure-all, church bell ropes breaking under the strain of constant tolls for the dead, the treasure chest of the abandoned College of Physicians looted by thieves, the main London post office “thick with smoke from constant fumigation” (p. 162), the emergency expenses incurred by parishes building new walls around extended burial grounds. An important thesis of the book grows out of such narrative details: the efforts of individuals (many nameless) should be celebrated, for in the face of staggering mortality many of the essential functions of life were carried on. “[E]conomic survival outweighed the risk of death,” as the authors say (p. 168). The phrase “London's most deadly year” in the sub-title may raise some eyebrows, since other writers have argued that the plague epidemics of 1563, 1603, and 1625 exacted higher mortality rates than that of 1665. The Mootes argue not only that the total mortality of 1665 was higher and so more “deadly,” but that the official 1665 toll was seriously undercounted, and the large numbers of people who fled (perhaps as many as 200,000) should be taken into account when calculating the mortality rate. They estimate that the mortality rate (“officially” about 19 per cent) might have in fact been upwards of 30 per cent of those who remained. Some responses were widely agreed on. Flight was perhaps the surest, especially for those who could afford it. Many people in both Londons persisted in denial of the presence of plague, a fact that certainly skews contemporary mortality statistics. Isolation and its applications, especially the shutting-up of infected houses, remained a major official response, in addition to religious services and succour. Fumigation, fires, and smoke all combated the fatal “miasma.” Dogs and cats, thought likely contagious agents, were massively slaughtered. But many uncertainties remained as well: the causal roles of miasma and contagion, the efficacy of Galenic, chemical, or mechanical theories and remedies, the uneasy coexistence of beliefs in divine providence and “scientific” explanations, and (perhaps most painful) the doctrine of individual responsibility versus the practical difficulties of life faced by the poor. The authors deliberately choose narration over analysis, but they at least notice some larger underlying issues. They mediate sensibly between optimistic (largely demographic) and pessimistic views of the epidemic's effects: their concentration on individuals’ experiences certainly reinforces a pessimistic view of a catastrophe, but that is tempered by their celebration of individual and collective heroism. Similarly sensible is their discussion, in the epilogue, of the now-contentious identity of the disease itself; they hold with Yersinia pestis as the probable causative organism, but present some of the current objections raised against it. Some other large questions would benefit from further discussion. How—for example—are the higher mortality rates suffered by women to be explained, apart from reference to pregnancy? Why did no further plague epidemics occur in London? (This point is discussed, but rather cursorily.) And what accounts for the 1665 epidemic's persistent hold on the folk memories and literary traditions of England? Lloyd and Dorothy Moote, by refocusing our attention on the everyday lives and deaths of Londoners in 1665, have, however, provided at least a partial answer to “why did it matter?”

London's Plague Years ‐ By Stephen Porter

HistoryVolume 92, Issue 306 p. 261-262 London's Plague Years - By Stephen Porter ERIC BOSTON, ERIC BOSTON Cambridge Arts and Sciences CollegeSearch for more papers by this author ERIC BOSTON, ERIC BOSTON Cambridge Arts and Sciences CollegeSearch for more papers by this author First published: 13 April 2007 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-229X.2007.394_13.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume92, Issue306April 2007Pages 261-262 RelatedInformation

Atishoo, atishoo, we all fall down

Do you know the nursery rhyme ‘A ring, a ring o'proses’? It is supposed to date back to the Great Plague of London in 1665. There is no evidence, I should stress, that this rhyme really does have its roots in the Great Plague but it is an illustration of how one era in history can reverberate through time. Typical of this could be our contemporary response to the issue of HIV. Twenty years ago this was a topic that provoked terror, partly fed by the tabloid newspapers writing about the virus as if it was a modern-day Plague. At that time, there was no cure and we were all led to believe an epidemic was certain.

Thucydides and Defoe: Two Plague narratives

This article offers a detailed comparison of two of the most famous narratives of epidemic disease in European literature, Thucydides’ account of the great plague of Athens (430 and 427 B.C.) in hisHistory of the Peloponnesian War and Daniel Defoe's description of the great plague of London (1664–65) A. D.) in his historical novel,A Journal of the Plague Year. It is argued first that the similarities between them, even though they are matters of content rather than close verbal resemblances, are sufficient, especially when put together with what we know of Defoe's life and education, to justify the assumption that the English writer knew Thucydides'History and was influenced by it. Attention is then focused on a striking difference between the two plague narratves, namely, the quantity of numerical information and how it is deployed. This analysis leads to some observations on the differences between the two writers in source material, literary genre, and narrative method.

Biology of plagues: evidence from historical populations

The threat of unstoppable plagues, such as AIDS and Ebola, is always with us. In Europe, the most devastating plagues were those from the Black Death pandemic in the 1300s to the Great Plague of London in 1665. For the last 100 years, it has been accepted that Yersinia pestis, the infective agent of bubonic plague, was responsible for these epidemics. This book combines modern concepts of epidemiology and molecular biology with computer-modelling. Applying these to the analysis of historical epidemics, the authors show that they were not, in fact, outbreaks of bubonic plague. Biology of Plagues offers a completely new interdisciplinary interpretation of the plagues of Europe and establishes them within a geographical, historical and demographic framework. This fascinating detective work will be of interest to readers in the social and biological sciences, and lessons learnt will underline the implications of historical plagues for modern-day epidemiology.

A Scottish doctor's association with the discovery of the plague bacillus.

Plague killed at least a quarter of the population of Europe in 1348. This was the first wave of the epidemic known as 'The Black Death' which continued for two years and then recurred sporadically till the late 17th Century. In London in 1603, 22.6% of the population died from plague and in the outbreak known as The Great Plague of London in 1694 there were over 70,000 deaths out of a population of 460,000. Many English villages were completely wiped out at this time. Marseilles suffered severely in 1720. The next serious outbreak was in Canton in China in 1894, the disease spreading to Hong Kong. 80,000 died, the great majority of these being in China. A Scottish doctor played an important part in the management of this epidemic when it reached the British colony, and by chance found himself on the periphery of the controversy about who first discovered Yersinia Pestis, the Gram negative bacillus that causes plague.

Thomas Manley and the Rate-of-Interest Debate, 1668–1673

Historians have seen the mid-1660s as a period of significant distress in many sectors of the English economy. With population pressure diminishing, agricultural prices moved away from the benefit of producers, and rent and land values stabilized. Indeed, landowners were futher burdened by the imposition of higher levels of taxation in the wake of debts generated by the Civil War and the Commonwealth. Moreover, English merchants complained that Dutch competition limited the expansion of their overseas commerce, while the Second Dutch War (1664–67) severely dislocated trade and incurred heavy public expenditure and even higher levels of taxation. The outbreak of plague in London, followed by the Great Fire, further interrupted trade at the commercial and transport nexus of the economy. Hence, war finance and the rebuilding of London put pressure on the stock of loanable funds in a period characterized by a generally low level of prices. Interest rates had fallen gradually with the increase in the availability of capital in the first half of the seventeenth century, yet this trend, according to Christopher Clay, “was unquestionably retarded by the extensive government borrowing associated with the succession of civil and foreign wars between 1642 and 1674.” Of course, in seventeenth-century England, a maximum rate of interest was set by statute. The medieval prohibition on usury was first broken in 1545, setting a ceiling of 10 percent per year.

The disappearance of plague: a continuing puzzle.

T THE most feared disease in early modern England was plague. Before its disappearance from England in i666,2 plague had for centuries been a dreaded visitor to the larger towns and cities of the kingdom. When an epidemic broke out in a city like London, the entire tenor of life changed. Many of the better-off inhabitants fled to the country to escape infection; commerce and industry stagnated; the usually teeming streets were empty. During the great London epidemic of i665, Samuel Pepys lamented, Lord, what a sad time it is, to see no boats upon the River-and grass grow all up and down Whitehall-court-and nobody but poor wretches in the streets.3 As if to celebrate the relentless advance of death, the bells of the parish churches rang out at each death and each burial. To contemporaries, it seemed that God was venting his wrath on a sinful mankind. In London and other great urban concentrations of Europe, the loss of life from plague was terrible. According to the Bills of Mortality, 70,594 persons died of plague in London during the epidemic of I 665-6. The actual figure was higher, because many plague deaths were mistakenly attributed to other diseases, and it has been estimated that this one epidemic claimed 8o,ooo victims, out of a total

The contribution of virology to contemporary medicine.

In the year 1636, eight years after the publication of his immortal work upon the circulation, William Harvey left London in the company of the Earl of Arundel and others on a mission to the Emperor Ferdinand. Europe at that time had been so ravaged by the 30 years' war and by epidemics of plague that a journey to Austria was both adven turous and hazardous. Nevertheless the travellers arrived safely at Linz and shortly afterwards Harvey was sent to Italy to acquire pictures for King Charles and to revisit Padua and Venice. He arrived at Treviso a few miles from Venice only to be thrown into a lazaretto on suspicion of infection because he had travelled through plague-stricken areas. A strict quarantine was in force for all travellers to Venice because of the severe epidemics in 1630, and Harvey's certificate testifying to his health was waved aside at Treviso. Inside the lazaretto Harvey remained in great discomfort, at first without even a bed, suffering from sciatica and chafing at the delay. His petitions for release were fruitless, he served the usual three weeks' quarantine, and his letters to Lord Denbigh at Venice were full of complaint (Keynes, 1966). Yet the quarantine of persons and goods coming from infected places was a measure advised by the Statutes of the College of Physicians (1630) and probably by Harvey himself in a futile attempt to restrict the spread of plague in London in the early seventeenth century. Harvey was undoubtedly aware of the concept of contagion as it had been proposed by Fracastorius in the century earlier as the transmission of an infectious principle. Fracastorius (1546) classified the modes of contagion as by contact, through the air, and on clothing but Harvey rejected the latter mode. Yet in his great book De Generatione Animalium he described fertilization as a 'kind of contagion' in that contagious diseases such as leprosy and plague 'propagate their infection and beget themselves in bodies previously sound and untouched' (Harvey, 1653). He was thwarted in his attempts to define the seminal principle by the lack of a microscope, and it fell to van Leeuwenhoeck in 1686 to see for the first time live spermatozoa from the uterus of a bitch. The description of van Leeuwenhoeck's 'little animals', the bacteria and protozoa which he saw in pond-water, saliva, and faeces, was indeed the origin of the science of microbiology (Dobell, 1932). Yet the discovery of the existence of the 'little animals' did not lead to the microbial theory of disease until the works of Pasteur, Koch, and many others in the nineteenth century (Bulloch, 1938). The first successful labora tory transmission of a virus infection was probably that of Pasteur and others who infected rabbits intracerebrally with rabies in 1881. Though viruses were filtered and their particles were seen, they remained as mysterious as the seeds of contagion postulated by Fracastorius until the twentieth century was well established.

Book Review: The Apothecaries in the Great Plague of London 1665

Book Review: The Apothecaries in the Great Plague of London 1665

DEFOE'S JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR TOPOGRAPHY AND INTENTION

UNTIL very recently Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year received little commendable scholarly attention. Critics felt disposed to argue single-mindedly either the Journal's absolute faithfulness to the historical record or its inventiveness; and in so doing concluded by minimizing its artistry or its reliability.' Mr. Frank Bastian, in his reconsideration of the work, has rectified the generalizations about the book's historical worth and the picture of Defoe as an unreliable recorder of the plague year.z He has dismissed the possibility that 'a large part of Defoe's information was actually derived from some diary, or manuscript observations, communicated to him by a member of his very family'3; he has shown that the Journal's facts, 'when they can be tested, prove to be neither recklessly invented, nor simply borrowed from previously published works';4 and he has revealed the historical reality of the characters appearing in the Journal. The full extent of Defoe's indebtedness, of course, can never be completely known. The plague, as a catastrophic event reshaping the lives of the society and recurring with deadly frequency, came down to Defoe's time with a body of anecdotal appendages and carried within itself the seeds of a mythology.s In 1835 E. W. Brayley prepared a text from the very rare first edition and provided a useful introduction and notes which showed Defoe's sources and his obvious indebtedness to contemporary publications, but he gave little attention to critical evaluation. Watson Nicholson, The Historical Sources of Defoe's 'Journal of the Plague Year' (Boston, 1919), went over the same ground, insisted that the Journal was a faithful record of historical fact, and concluded that Defoe was a shoddy stylist and an execrable artist (pp. 48, 76, 90). Five years later, Arthur Secord, Studies in the Narrative Method of Defoe (Urbana, 1924), pointed out Nicholson's faulty evaluation of both Defoe's sources and his manipulation of them and remarked that 'Dr. Nicholson's contention [that is, the Journal's historicity] may be dismissed as valueless' (p. 232). Also in 1924 Walter G. Bell (The Great Plague in London in z665 (London)) reaffirmed Defoe's dependence upon published sources but insisted that the Journal be accepted as an historical fiction (p. v). A decade later Professor Secord, making the most of Bell's historical researches, gladly recalled the discrepancies from fact in Defoe's narrative and, equating unreliability with inventiveness, concluded that 'a large part of the Journal is, therefore, proved imaginative' (Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year and Other Pieces (New York, 1935), p. xxvii). 2 'Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year Reconsidered', R.E.S., N.S., xiv (1965), 151-73. 3 Brayley, Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (London, 1835), p. x. 4 Bastian, loc. cit., p. 156. s There is, for example, Defoe's account of the sleeping piper, told also in Sir John Reresby's Memoirs, published in 1734. But this nightmarish anecdote of mistaken identity goes as far back as Thomas Dekker's The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinarie,

"BRING OUT YOUR DEAD"

This gruesome exhortation brings to mind the Great Plague of London, which reached a peak just 300 years ago. Plague, one of the great afflictions of mankind, has a long history whose origins are obscure. Its greatest outbreak, the black death, wiped out a fourth of the population of Europe in the 14th century. In 1665, London, with a population totaling some 460,000, had deaths amounting to almost 70,000, a mortality estimate that may very well be too low (See cover). Contemporary documents offer a fascinating account. Most readily available are the diaries of Samuel Pepys, in which the entries for 1665 indicate the degree to which the plague, in its rise and decline, affected a well-to-do Englishman. Business and social events went on, pretty much as usual, and the war with Holland greatly concerned the merchants. On June 20, for example a victory over the Dutch was far more

Plague, Population and Economic Decline in England in the Later Middle Ages

j'rom the appearance of the Black Death in I 348 to the Great Plague of London in i665 outbreaks of plague were frequent in England. The consequences of the first, and most devastating, of these epidemics the Black Death have already received considerable attention. But the results of the plagues that followed in its wake have so far almost completely escaped detailed examination. The details of contemporary references to these epidemics were collected and summarized by Charles Creighton in his History of Epidemics in Britain, published in i 89 .1 However, it was not until I94I that his references received the attention they deserved. In a stimulating paper,2 MrJohn Saltmarsh suggested that the presence of plague in England during this period might provide a satisfactory explanation for the phenomena revealed by the recent investigations of economic historians for example, declining rents and marginal lands falling out of cultivation all of which, it was suggested, indicated a marked decline of population. 'There was ... a succession of epidemics in England, on a national scale from I36i to some point in the fifteenth century; thereafter on a local scale, and restricted to the towns, and especially to the greater towns ... More than any single catastrophe, this continual sapping of the human resources of England would account for the gradual but continuous decay of her national prosperity ... The period in the middle of the fifteenth century which was if we may judge by London especially unhealthy coincides with the deepest point of the depression; and the gradual slackening of the power of plague, which naturally sets in as its reign wears on, would permit the gradual recovery of the early Tudor period.'3 The attractiveness of this theory compels us to examine it in the light of such evidence as is available. This task is greatly aided by the advances in scientific knowledge of plague which have been made since Creighton wrote and which resulted from the investigations in the East during the pandemic of i894 and onwards.4 The habits of plague are now understood and past outbreaks can be much more easily identified from contemporary descriptions. The exact nature of our problem must be defined. The catastrophic conse-

Early American Medical Imprints: A Guide to Works Printed in the United States, 1668-1820

The History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine has prepared a bibliography of imprints published in the United States before 1821. Robert B. Austin, who has recently retired after 30 years of service to the Library, was largely responsible for the volume. Approximately 70 libraries or societies are the repositories for the items listed, including the Royal College of Surgeons of England. There are several imprints that seem to me especially worthy of note. Undoubtedly, others would compile quite a different list of interests. The activities of county and state medical societies and county and city health departments are well documented in this period. Nine editions of William Cullen's First Lines of the Practice of Physic were published between 1781 and 1816 and 3 editions of his Synopsis of Methodical Nosology between 1783 and 1793. Daniel DeFoe's story of the 1665 epidemic of the plague in London