Loimographia : an account of the great plague of London in the year 1665 / by William Boghurst... edited by Joseph Frank Payne.

  • Boghurst, William, 1631-1685.
Date:
MDCCCXCIV [1894]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Loimographia : an account of the great plague of London in the year 1665 / by William Boghurst... edited by Joseph Frank Payne. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    yeare, as Heylin saith in bis Geography. And these things I have layd downe as a lover of History, in Confirmation of that saying of Solomon (Ecc. i, 10), Is there anything whereof it may bee said, Loe this is new I It bath beene already of old tyme which was before us ? That wee may more clearely see that good men have fallen under this common scourge of mankind as well as bad. Quid enim in hoc mundo non commitne cum ceteris qvam diu adhuc secundum legem primce nativitatis manet caro ista communis ? saith St. Cyprian to the Christians who stumbled at this piece of providence in his tyme (Sermo de mortalitate). Nay, good men have beene sooner taken away than bad, as it was at the Plague at Athens, Ai€(f)6eipovTo kclI fidktara oi ap€Tr]<; ti fieTaTTOLov/Mevoi, those dyed most that had any goodness or vertue in them, saith Thucydides, because they looked upon themselves obliged, as it followes in the same Historian, not to fly and leave their friends, but to helpe them in their misery. And Dionysius informes us that the same fate attended the Christians in the Plague at Alexandria. The best of the brethren dyed because they did not separate themselves, but sedulously administered to the sicke in their necessityes. Hee that hath a minde to heare of more Plagues may reade a great catalogue of them in the latter end of Athanasius Kircher in his hooke called Scrutinium Pestis, also in Diemerbrook his Booke of the Plague. Now I shall make some short inquiry in the nature and causes of the Plague as a student in Physick; and as the essence and quiddity of all things, and soe of all diseases, are very abstruse partly in themselves and partly to our understandings, which with the Fox in the fable lick only the outside of the Glasse, as haveing noe intelligence but what they receive from the outward senses, which in most things are very dull and doubtful informers; soe among all diseases the nature of none is soe mysterious as that of the Pestilence, and therefore it is called by the psalmist the pestilence that walketh in darkness, qxda causce ejus latent, as Grotius saith, and this disease hath beene the more a Eiddle to us because men's feares have made them strangers to it and fly it, at least hindred them from those narrow, accurate, and watchfull observations upon its motions, which are requisite for the beginning of knowledge; as Diemer- brook saith, noe man had writt particularly of many things happening in the plague before hee did, being frighted with the Disease it selfe. That of Helmont is too true in his Treatise, Dc Pcstc; ipsimet doctores et scribentcs primo