A journal of the plague year, or, Memorials of the great pestilence in London, in 1665 / by Daniel De Foe. Revised edition with historical notes by E. W. Brayley ... Also, some account of the great fire in London in 1666, by Gideon Harvey ... with an appendix containing the Earl of Clarendon's account of the fire. With illustrations on steel by George Cruikshank.

  • Daniel Defoe
Date:
[1881]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A journal of the plague year, or, Memorials of the great pestilence in London, in 1665 / by Daniel De Foe. Revised edition with historical notes by E. W. Brayley ... Also, some account of the great fire in London in 1666, by Gideon Harvey ... with an appendix containing the Earl of Clarendon's account of the fire. With illustrations on steel by George Cruikshank. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    particularly in houses where all the families or inhabitants have been dead, and carried out, they would break in at all hazards, and without regard to the danger of infec- tion, take even the clothes off the dead bodies, and the bed-clothes from others where they lay dead.* This, I suppose, must be [hJ^e been] the case of a family in Houndsditch^ where a man and his daughter (the rest of the family being, as I suppose, carried away before, by the dead-cart) were found stark naked, one in one chamber, and one in another, lying dead on the floor; and the clothes of the beds (from whence 'tis supposed they were rolled off by thieves) stolen, and carried quite away. It is indeed to be observed, that the women were, in all this calamity, the most rash, fearless, and desperate crea- tures ; and as there were vast numbei's that went about as nurses, to tend those that were sick, they committed a great many petty thieveries in the houses where they were employed; and some of them were publicly whipped for it, when perhaps they ought rather to have been hanged for examples: for numbers of houses were robbed on these occasions, till at length the parish officers were sent to recommend nurses to the sick, and always took an account who it was they sent, so as that they might call them to account, if the house had been abused where they were placed. But these robberies extended chiefly to wearing clothes, linen, and what rings or money they could come at, when * Dr. Hodges's work confirms the stories of the dishonesty and rapacity of nurses, and he mentions one who was found dead with a bundle of stolen property, which she had just plundered, lying by her. — Loimologia, p. x. edit. 1671.—De Foe, however, in the above paragraph, has inconsistently stated, that the bodies of the dead were stripped by plunderers, even in those houses from which they had all been carried out.