After some reflections on how mass evacuations (the term he uses here is disposing) of the city, thereby reducing its population density, might proportionally reduce the impact of the disease in any future calamity, the author resumes a familiar theme: the lack of a method to test for the illness among those who have no symptoms, and thus a lack of a means to prevent the spread of the disease.
After relating anecdotes of those who were themselves infected, and who infected others, prior to becoming visibly ill, he reviews some theories of the day about how to test for the disease. Some said the plague could be detected in the breath of the infected; others, that their breath would kill birds. In one passage, he mentions the belief of some of his contemporaries that the breath of plague victims, when examined under a microscope (which was unavailable at the time of the plague itself, he says) would reveal tiny monsters: “dragons, snakes, serpents, and devils, horrible to behold.” Just short of a decade after the plague in London, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek had used a microscope of his own design to reveal the existence of microbes for the first time, and Robert Hook’s Micrographia was contemporaneous with the London plague, so possibly the author would be referring to these discoveries, or at least, popular misconceptions about them, in this account, written in the 1720s.
[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