This longish episode takes up a terribly important topic: beliefs among the author’s contemporaries as to how the plague was transmitted. Londoners of the 17th century clearly had a notion of contagion, and naturally enough they believed that the plague was transmitted through contact with infected persons, with their breath, or sweat, or even their clothing. The actual agent of transmission was unclear, neither bacteria nor the role of the flea being known to them. Nonetheless, if the plague was the result of contact with infected persons, it follows then that the best form of prevention was to avoid contact with them. Hence the shutting up of houses.
The problem, as the author points out, is that the disease also appeared to be transmitted from people who were ostensibly well, and against that contingency no quarantine was practical, although people did practice a form of social distancing by secluding themselves voluntarily, avoiding crowds, and walking in the middle of the streets, this last a practice known to us today. In one particularly interesting passage, he sketches a basic epidemiological technique of discovering the source of an infection by tracing the contacts the sick person had prior to becoming ill, a method (formalized today as “contact tracing”) he acknowledges has problems of its own, for “none knows how far to carry that back, or where to stop.”
There is also the question of the role of God in this calamity. The author acknowledges that while the visitation is an act of God, it is an act carried out through natural means, through physical agents, such as those mentioned above. It is in the miraculous recoveries he occasionally sees, including, perhaps, his own escape from infection, that he discerns the possibility of divine intervention in the day-to-day affairs of humans.
In the end, unable to assign either a first cause or a specific means of avoiding the plague, he recommends the one true method of staying safe: flight.
[For notes on the main themes of the novel, visit https://londonplague.com/postscript/. To see some ways in which our reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are anticipated in the Journal, see https://londonplague.com/concordance/.]
Credits:
Podcast produced by Sam Brelsfoard.
Music from Funeral Sentences of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), performed by the Choir of Clare College at the University of Cambridge, Timothy Brown conducting. Used by permission.
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© 2020 Mark Cummings