undred and fifty-six
buried in all at the London pesthouse, and one hundred and fifty-nine at
that of Westminster.

By having more pesthouses, I am far from meaning a forcing all people
into such places. Had the shutting up of houses been omitted, and the
sick hurried out of their dwellings to pesthouses, as some proposed it
seems at that time as well as since, it[253] would certainly have been
much worse than it was. The very removing the sick would have been a
spreading of the infection, and the rather because that removing could
not effectually clear the house where the sick person was of the
distemper; and the rest of the family, being then left at liberty, would
certainly spread it among others.

The methods, also, in private families which would have been universally
used to have concealed the distemper, and to have concealed the persons
being sick, would have been such that the distemper would sometimes have
seized a whole family before any visitors or examiners could have known
of it. On the other hand, the prodigious numbers which would have been
sick at a time would have exceeded all the capacity of public pesthouses
to receive them, or of public officers to discover and remove them.

This was well considered in those days, and I have heard them talk of it
often. The magistrates had enough to do to bring people to submit to
having their houses shut up; and many ways they deceived the watchmen,
and got out, as I observed. But that difficulty made it apparent that
they would have found it impracticable to have gone the other way to
work; for they could never have forced the sick people out of their beds
and out of their dwellings: it must not have been my lord mayor's
officers, but an army of officers, that must have attempted it. And the
people, on the other hand, would have been enraged and desperate, and
would have killed those that should have offered to have meddled with
them or with their children and relations, whatever had befallen them
for it; so that they would have made the people (who, as it was, were in
the most terrible distraction imaginable), I say, they would have made
them stark mad: whereas the magistrates found it proper on several
occasions to treat them with lenity and compassion, and not with
violence and terror, such as dragging the sick out of their houses, or
obliging them to remove themselves, would have been.

This leads me again to mention the time when the plague first
began,[25