nd which I
thought seemed untrue, viz., that the infected people were utterly
careless as to giving the infection to others, and rather forward to do
it than not; and I believe it was partly from this very thing that they
raised that suggestion, which I hope was not really true in fact.

I confess no particular case is sufficient to prove a general; but I
could name several people, within the knowledge of some of their
neighbors and families yet living, who showed the contrary to an
extreme. One man, the master of a family in my neighborhood, having had
the distemper, he thought he had it given him by a poor workman whom he
employed, and whom he went to his house to see, or went for some work
that he wanted to have finished; and he had some apprehensions even
while he was at the poor workman's door, but did not discover it[271]
fully; but the next day it discovered itself, and he was taken very ill,
upon which he immediately caused himself to be carried into an
outbuilding which he had in his yard, and where there was a chamber over
a workhouse, the man being a brazier. Here he lay, and here he died, and
would be tended by none of his neighbors but by a nurse from abroad, and
would not suffer his wife, nor children, nor servants, to come up into
the room, lest they should be infected, but sent them his blessing and
prayers for them by the nurse, who spoke it to them at a distance; and
all this for fear of giving them the distemper, and without which, he
knew, as they were kept up, they could not have it.

And here I must observe also that the plague, as I suppose all
distempers do, operated in a different manner on differing
constitutions. Some were immediately overwhelmed with it, and it came to
violent fevers, vomitings, insufferable headaches, pains in the back,
and so up to ravings and ragings with those pains; others with swellings
and tumors in the neck or groin, or armpits, which, till they could be
broke, put them into insufferable agonies and torment; while others, as
I have observed, were silently infected, the fever preying upon their
spirits insensibly, and they seeing little of it till they fell into
swooning and faintings, and death without pain.

I am not physician enough to enter into the particular reasons and
manner of these differing effects of one and the same distemper, and of
its differing operation in several bodies; nor is it my business here to
record the observations which I really made, beca