adful
visitation should happen in this city, that all women that are with
child or that give suck should be gone, if they have any possible means,
out of the place, because their misery, if infected, will so much exceed
all other people's.

I could tell here dismal stories of living infants being found sucking
the breasts of their mothers, or nurses, after they have been dead of
the plague. Of a mother in the parish where I lived, who, having a child
that was not well, sent for an apothecary to view the child; and when he
came, as the relation goes, was giving the child suck at her breast, and
to all appearance was herself very well; but when the apothecary came
close to her he saw the tokens upon that breast with which she was
suckling the child. He was surprised enough, to be sure, but, not
willing to fright the poor woman too much, he desired she would give the
child into his hand; so he takes the child, and going to a cradle in
the room, lays it in, and opening its cloths, found the tokens upon the
child too, and both died before he could get home to send a preventive
medicine to the father of the child, to whom he had told their
condition. Whether the child infected the nurse-mother or the mother
the child was not certain, but the last most likely. Likewise of a child
brought home to the parents from a nurse that had died of the plague,
yet the tender mother would not refuse to take in her child, and laid it
in her bosom, by which she was infected; and died with the child in her
arms dead also.

It would make the hardest heart move at the instances that were
frequently found of tender mothers tending and watching with their dear
children, and even dying before them, and sometimes taking the distemper
from them and dying, when the child for whom the affectionate heart had
been sacrificed has got over it and escaped.

The like of a tradesman in East Smithfield, whose wife was big with
child of her first child, and fell in labour, having the plague upon
her. He could neither get midwife to assist her or nurse to tend her,
and two servants which he kept fled both from her. He ran from house to
house like one distracted, but could get no help; the utmost he could
get was, that a watchman, who attended at an infected house shut up,
promised to send a nurse in the morning. The poor man, with his heart
broke, went back, assisted his wife what he could, acted the part of the
midwife, brought the child dead into the world