Posted on 03/28/2020 2:12:17 PM PDT by SmokingJoe
This was the worst outbreak of plague in England since the black death of 1348. London lost roughly 15% of its population. While 68,596 deaths were recorded in the city, the true number was probably over 100,000. Other parts of the country also suffered.
The earliest cases of disease occurred in the spring of 1665 in a parish outside the city walls called St Giles-in-the-Fields. The death rate began to rise during the hot summer months and peaked in September when 7,165 Londoners died in one week.
Rats carried the fleas that caused the plague. They were attracted by city streets filled with rubbish and waste, especially in the poorest areas.
Those who could, including most doctors, lawyers and merchants, fled the city. Charles II and his courtiers left in July for Hampton Court and then Oxford. Parliament was postponed and had to sit in October at Oxford, the increase of the plague being so dreadful. Court cases were also moved from Westminster to Oxford.
The Lord Mayor and aldermen (town councillors) remained to enforce the King’s orders to try and stop the spread of the disease. The poorest people remained in London with the rats and those people who had the plague. Watchmen locked and kept guard over infected houses. Parish officials provided food. Searchers looked for dead bodies and took them at night to plague pits for burial.
All trade with London and other plague towns was stopped. The Council of Scotland declared that the border with England would be closed. There were to be no fairs or trade with other countries. This meant many people lost their jobs – from servants to shoemakers to those who worked on the River Thames.
You got rats on the west side, bedbugs Uptown.
1666 vs 2020 ???
Cue the, “Bring out your dead!”, pic.
Since this is SARS-CoV-2 wouldn’t it be more instructive to find out how the SARS-CoV-1 in 2003 was dealt with?
Rats spread disease. It’s a fact!
Totally different yes.
However I was struck by how all these doctors and lawyers and the “elite” got the heck out of own then, just like a lot of them are doing right now.
Same New York elite who looked down their nose at flyover country and called them “smelly” (ref Don Lemon show a few weeks back), are now busy fleeing to the same flyover country now.
Good point missed it
Mostly, it’s the fleas they carry around.
Then the following year they torched the place.
The Rats carried it the fleas distributed it.
I thought the Pied Piper killed the rats.
I am speaking now of people made desperate by the apprehensions of their being shut up, and their breaking out by stratagem or force, either before or after they were shut up, whose misery was not lessened when they were out, but sadly increased. On the other hand, many that thus got away had retreats to go to and other houses, where they locked themselves up and kept hid till the plague was over; and many families, foreseeing the approach of the distemper, laid up stores of provisions sufficient for their whole families, and shut themselves up, and that so entirely that they were neither seen or heard of till the infection was quite ceased, and then came abroad sound and well. I might recollect several such as these, and give you the particulars of their management; for, doubtless, it was the most effectual secure step that could be taken for such whose circumstances would not admit them to remove, or who had not retreats abroad proper for the case; for, in being thus shut up, they were as if they had been a hundred miles off. Nor do I recall that any one of those families miscarried.
Daniel DeFoe, Journal Of The Plague Year (pub. 1722)
Great graphic. Thanks.
Puts things in perspective.
My question is how did they determine the numbers back at
the beginning when there were no true world communications?
Go ahead, bite the Big Apple, don’t mind the maggots...
Shattered
Bring out your dead!
Historical pandemics prior to modern germ theory relied on quarantines in one form or another. It has been argued that religious pilgrimage sites where large numbers of people came to for healing were centers of further pandemics throughout history.
Well, it did just start.
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