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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    aufugiunt.'^ The great Doctors and such as undertake to write about the disease are the first that run away from it, and soe as it followes, omnis illorum doctrina fundamento putationis innititur, and therefore all their learning about it can bee but opiniative and conjectural]. Now the first question that occurrs in Moderne Physitians about this disease is an sit morbus totius suhstantice, how properly the question is worded I shall not dispute, let that rest upon rernelius, who was the first coyner of it, but their mean- ing is this, whether the Pestilence is Morbus intemperiei, a disease which proceedes from the excesse of some manifest quality as heat, moisture, or from some venomous quality, occult or unknowne to us which doth immediately prey upon the vitall spirits or principles of life, or, in a word, whether the disease may be reduced to some manifest quality or to some occult quality; and the latter writers, and those the most learned and juditious, generally agree in this, That the Gontinens causa, that 1 may use the words of Taurellus in Methodo Medicce Priedictionis ;—nec putredo nec injlammatio sed occulta qumdam et venenata vis, neither the putrefaction nor inflammation of humors produced by the excesse of some manifest quality as heat, cold, moisture, etc., but the con- tagious influence of some peculiar poyson or venom, imme- diately seizing upon the heart and spirits. And this is the judgment of the learned Gregory Horstius in his Ceiituria Frohlematum Therapeuticorum (Decad. 10), and of Sennertus in his Treatise, De Peste, Riverius, De febre pestilentiali, of Saracenus, Valleriola, and Fernelius, Omnis pestilentice caeca et delitescens est causa, et aliunde quam ex primis qualitatibus aut ex putredine profecta (De abditis verum causis, lib. 2, cap. 12). And those learned men, who will have the pestilence essentially and formally a fever, as they have been greatly divided among themselves in the explication of their opinion (as you may see in Horstius the place above quoted), soe they all greatly wandered from the truth, for there have beeue pestilences without a fever or any signs of putrefaction. Wee receive it not only from the Testimony of Hippocrates in the third of his Epidemicks in sundry passages, and from the Testimony of Galen in his exposition of that booke, but from the experience of severall later physitians. The effects of the Pestilence are soe strange and horrid, and raise such tragedyes, which cannot be reckoned meere effects of putrefaction, and of the exorbitancy of manifest qualityes. Those remedyes which resist putrefaction and availe in * Van Helmont, Tumulus Pestis, 1644, p. 5,
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