r would any citizen of probity, and that could be depended
upon, have staid in the town if they had been made liable to such a
severity.

Seeing, then, that we could come at the certainty of things by no method
but that of inquiry of the neighbors or of the family (and on that we
could not justly depend), it was not possible but that the uncertainty
of this matter would remain as above.

It is true, masters of families were bound by the order to give notice
to the examiner of the place wherein he lived, within two hours after he
should discover it, of any person being sick in his house, that is to
say, having signs of the infection; but they found so many ways to evade
this, and excuse their negligence, that they seldom gave that notice
till they had taken measures to have every one escape out of the house
who had a mind to escape, whether they were sick or sound. And while
this was so, it was easy to see that the shutting up of houses was no
way to be depended upon as a sufficient method for putting a stop to the
infection, because, as I have said elsewhere, many of those that so went
out of those infected houses had the plague really upon them, though
they might really think themselves sound; and some of these were the
people that walked the streets till they fell down dead: not that they
were suddenly struck with the distemper, as with a bullet that killed
with the stroke, but that they really had the infection in their blood
long before, only that, as it preyed secretly on their vitals, it
appeared not till it seized the heart with a mortal power, and the
patient died in a moment, as with a sudden fainting or an apoplectic
fit.

I know that some, even of our physicians, thought for a time that those
people that so died in the streets were seized but that moment they
fell, as if they had been touched by a stroke from heaven, as men are
killed by a flash of lightning; but they found reason to alter their
opinion afterward, for, upon examining the bodies of such after they
were dead, they always either had tokens upon them, or other evident
proofs of the distemper having been longer upon them than they had
otherwise expected.

This often was the reason that, as I have said, we that were examiners
were not able to come at the knowledge of the infection being entered
into a house till it was too late to shut it up, and sometimes not till
the people that were left were all dead. In Petticoat Lane two houses
together