iseases of the period. He says, "If I entered into a chamber
which had been uninhabited for months, I was immediately seized with a
fever." He ascribed the fearful plague of the sweating sickness to this
cause. So, too, the noted Dr. Caius advised sanitary precautions against
the plague, and in after-generations, Mead, Pringle, and others urged
them; but the prevailing thought was too strong, and little was done.
Even the floor of the presence chamber of Queen Elizabeth in Greenwich
Palace was "covered with hay, after the English fashion," as one of the
chroniclers tells us.

In the seventeenth century, aid in these great scourges was mainly
sought in special church services. The foremost English churchmen during
that century being greatly given to study of the early fathers of the
Church; the theological theory of disease, so dear to the fathers, still
held sway, and this was the case when the various visitations reached
their climax in the great plague of London in 1665, which swept off more
than a hundred thousand people from that city. The attempts at meeting
it by sanitary measures were few and poor; the medical system of
the time was still largely tinctured by superstitions resulting from
medieval modes of thought; hence that plague was generally attributed to
the Divine wrath caused by "the prophaning of the Sabbath." Texts from
Numbers, the Psalms, Zechariah, and the Apocalypse were dwelt upon in
the pulpits to show that plagues are sent by the Almighty to punish
sin; and perhaps the most ghastly figure among all those fearful scenes
described by De Foe is that of the naked fanatic walking up and down the
streets with a pan of fiery coals upon his head, and, after the manner
of Jonah at Nineveh, proclaiming woe to the city, and its destruction in
forty days.

That sin caused this plague is certain, but it was sanitary sin. Both
before and after this culmination of the disease cases of plague were
constantly occurring in London throughout the seventeenth century; but
about the beginning of the eighteenth century it began to disappear. The
great fire had done a good work by sweeping off many causes and centres
of infection, and there had come wider streets, better pavements, and
improved water supply; so that, with the disappearance of the plague,
other diseases, especially dysenteries, which had formerly raged in the
city, became much less frequent.

But, while these epidemics were thus checked in London, other