the Vulidily of the Doctrine of Contagion in the Tlague. 23 



lential effects of the regular returns of these enervating winds may 

 be attributedj it is very easy to comprehend how London, as Sy- 

 denham gives us to understand, in a Hke crowded and narrow 

 and dirty state of the streets without drains, such as it was pre- 

 vious to the great fire, should now and then have been subject, 

 in particular constitutions of the atmosphere, to visitations of the 

 plague. Is inclined to think the plague is of an analogous nature 

 to fever, and dependent on the same general causes, only that the 

 causes are influenced by the climate and atmosphere of the place, 

 and by the manners and circumstances of its inhabitants. It is 

 the conclusion of a very sensible writer on the plague, who ap- 

 pears to have well studied his subject, that the miasmata, which 

 in Germany and England produced tertians, in Hungary pesti- 

 lential fevers, in Italv remittents, in Syria and Egypt seem to 

 occasion the plague. Does not believe the plague is a contagious 

 disease, nor fevers in general. 



Being asked to furnish the Committee with some of the early 

 accounts as to the plague — answers, " The first I shall beg leave 

 to mention is given by Alexander Benedictus, who tells us, that 

 in consequence of shaking a feather-bed, which had been thrown 

 aside in the corner of a house seven years before, a plague was 

 raised at Wrateslaw,which carried off 5,900 peoplejn twelveweeks. 

 The same author gives an instance of the effects of the pestilen- 

 tial contagion, which had been shut up in a rag for fourteei 

 years. Hieronymus Fracastorius and Forestus say, that about 

 1511, when the Germans were at Verona, twenty-five soldiers 

 died, one after another, from putting on an old leathern coat ; 

 and that, ere the cause was discovered, 10,000 persons perished. 

 The coat was then, very prudently, burnt. Another author, 

 Victor Trincavellius, relates, that at Justinoples, in Italy, some 

 cords which had been made use of in burying the dead of a 

 former plague, twenty years before, infected the person who 

 found them behind a box, and caused the death of 10,000 

 people. Our countrvman, Dr. Mead, relates, on the authority 

 of Sir Theodore Maycrne, that some clothes, fouled with blood 

 and matter from plague sores, beinq lodged between matting and 

 the walls of a house in Paris, gave the plague, several years after, 

 to a workman who took them out, ^vhich presentU' spread through 

 the city. The same author discovered that the plague of Lon- 

 don, 1(JG5, was curried to Poole, in Dorsetshire, in a pedlar's 

 pack, and to Eham, in the Peak of Derbyshire, by a tailor's box ; 

 but he leaves us in the dark as to tiie manner by which it was 

 conveyed to other places in England, over a great part of which 

 lie says it spread Ingram, who writes on the plague, gives an 

 historical account of it, in respect to foreign countries, from l.'34() 

 to IGG5. I vvould only, however, beg leave to give the history 



B4 of 



