THE GREAT PLAGUE.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4826, 23 March 1925, Page 3

THE GREAT PLAGUE.

STORIES OF LONDON’S HORROR. ■ A TRAGEDY OF ERRORS.” A vision of the horror of London under the Great Plague in the year 1665 wais given by Mr Walter G. Bell, the historian of Old London, in a paper read to a recent meeting of the London Hospital Medical Society over which. Mr Russell Howard, surgeon to the London Hospital, presided. At the outset Mr Bell said-thut. London’s population in the calamitous year did not exceed half a million. Tlie capital was so small that the Wewt-end had not yet spread up the Haymarket, and in the East the town stopped a little beyond Whitechapel Church. London's City Wall —an actual stone wall, standing high—was still fairly complete from the Tower of London by the cast and north round to Aldersgate, with considerable remains westward towards .the Thames, We knew London in the Great Plague best from Defoe’s famous pages. Defoe explained that the pl,ague came to the then little capital of ours via Holland, from Turkey. Dr. Nathaniel Hodges, who practised in London during the plague, said the same thing. We now knew, however, .that witch was not the case, for, so far from being of foreign origin, the plague arose in oiir ■own streets, having its birth in ths close, dark, and filthy wooden-built houses of Restoration London’s slums, rat-infested as a matter of course. London had a story of plague that was closely continuous for a hundred and fifty years—a period over which there were fairly ample records —and it was probably continuous for about three centuries, back to the Black Death of •the. Middle Ages.. The Great. Plague began to appear soon after a hard and long winter’;: frost broke at the end of March, 1665. Starting in. St. Giles-in-the-Fiekls, it spread in April and. May to the adjoining parishes of St. Martin-in-the-Fields and St. Margaret, Westminster, with sporadic cases in St. Clement Danes and even within the walled city. But till June was out more than half the fatal c,ases reported each week were in the originating parish of' St. Giles. In July the great up-leap began. In Clerkenwell, to take an example, the deaths for the four weeks of May, 1665, were four, then three, rising to nine. In June they went down to two a week. Then in July they went up in a rush to 170 in a single week at the peak. If May s figures represented the normal death rate, by. August the whole population must have been swept away. These figures showed better tlia-n anything else the real .tragedy of the plague. Though we spoke of the Plague in London, it was least destructive of life in the , walled city, but ravaged the outlying slums which had sprung up as London, the chief industrial city, spread beyond its earlier confines. First the fashionable classes, then the rich merchants and the well-to-do tradesmen and masters of crafts fled out of London to escape the danger. They left thousands of their servants a nd cifcftsmen without employment, and these peo-ple.'-finding themselves destitute, fell back into the shims. The plague got into tne slums, and as it decimated the population others of the poor came in to be struck down in turn. In the Liberties the deaths rose to 3700 a week. A point, that had not been; understood was that in the area within the city walk which contained tne Cathedral, Guildhall, Exchange, and al! the Companies’ Halls, and was then the heart of London,. as it was to-day, the daths were not one-sixth of th whole. Not without reason was the visitation called “The Poor’s Plague,” for the cold truth was that .very few people of the better-off classes fell victims to it. Not a single alderman or magistrate succumbed. RAT-INFESTED SLUMS.

Passing to the causes of the Plague, Mr Bell said it was now known that bubonic plague was due to a germ introduced to the blood by the rat flea. Plague was really an animal, disease which, unfortunately, could be communicated to man. It broke out among rats, and the rat flea, gorged with the infected blood of its host, and the bacilli contained therein, left the dead rat to. find another host. In ratinfeuted houses the new host was man. The bacillus was a rod-like structure, which repeatedly elongated and divided i.nto two, each end going off as a separate life. In this way the .bacillus multiplied very rapidly. But none of these facts were known to the doctors of the Restoration, and we had to envisage them stumbling about in absolute ignorance. The prevalent medical belief, so far as it had expression, was that the infection of plague remained in the air. Hence the burning of strong-smelling substances, “to correct the infectious air.” was the recommendation of the Royal College of Physicians in 1665. A minority view was that the plague was harboured in the soil. The rat was above suspicion. Not one single mention of him had the lecturer been able to find in the medical writings of the time. Dogs and cats, which might have destroyed the rats, were killed off by thousands. No fewer than 4800 dogs were killed in. the City alone as a measure of plague prevention. while the rat was left to live and flourish in the old, dirty, decaying, timber-built houses of London, and fed fat on tlie garbage and decaying refuse left lying about. Certainly the plague received every assistance, and in calling it a “Tragedy of Errbi-s,” said Mr Bell, he did not think he exaggerated.

As the plague was thought to highly infectious the chief measure of “prevention” adopted was the shutting up of infected houses with all the people within them, the sick and the healthy together. No new methods were devised for combating the disease. Plague was the will of God, and the masses of the people so accepted it the authorities setting aside a monthly day for fasting and humiliation to avert the Divine vengeance. To escape the fate of being shut up in a plague-stricken house people scattered far and wide, bringing the

infection with them, and the same sorry tale of the plague came to be told throughout the Home Counties, in East Anglia, and as far north os Newcastle-on-Tyne. A further source of infection was the operations of ghouls known ats ‘‘brokers of the dead,” who for trifling sums purchased the effects of the dead or of the living to sell again these articles from infc'cled houses. The nursing profession did not then exist. There was no body of educated, high-minded, .et alone trained, women to draw upon. Such was the difficulty of filling the post of “nurse-keepers” that none could be refused. “Dirty, ugly, unwholesome hags” was the description given by a contemporary writer. The total deaths in London in the Plague year Mr Bell estimated at 110,000, a proportion of almost, one in every three of those who stayed. That was an alarming figure, but it did not exaggerate the fact. Many had thought that the shortage of the Bills of Mortality was due to the various religious sects who refused to notify their dead to the parish church. The shortage was, in fuel, mostly due to the unrecorded burials in the.ghastly plague pits which began to encircle Londen in the neartut fields and churchyards. No full account could be kept. In conclusion, Mr Bell said that he had found himself wondering what would happen were the plague to break out to-day in some area ?f London with a population of half a million—the population of all London in the Great Plague. He doubted if, with our modern knowledge and practice, the mortality would be over 5 per cent, of that in 1665.

A dise'-rssion followed in the course of which the vicar of Stepney produced the-register of deaths and burials in the parish during the . plague year. Dr. Bulloch exhibited the skull “of an ; ncient Briton of the Plague period” dug up when the Rivoli music hall, in Whitechapel, was being built. With it were found numerous other bones There was no doubt that 1 small plague pit had been unearthed. Viscount Burnham expressed the thanks of the meeting to Mr Bell for his lecture.