s were more
particularly horrible, as some were; but this was, indeed, at the first
heat of the distemper.

Time inured them to it all, and they ventured everywhere afterwards
without hesitation, as I shall have occasion to mention at large
hereafter.

I am supposing now the plague to be begun, as I have said, and that the
magistrates began to take the condition of the people into their serious
consideration. What they did as to the regulation of the inhabitants and
of infected families, I shall speak to by itself; but as to the affair
of health, it is proper to mention it here that, having seen the foolish
humour of the people in running after quacks and mountebanks, wizards
and fortune-tellers, which they did as above, even to madness, the Lord
Mayor, a very sober and religious gentleman, appointed physicians
and surgeons for relief of the poor--I mean the diseased poor and in
particular ordered the College of Physicians to publish directions for
cheap remedies for the poor, in all the circumstances of the distemper.
This, indeed, was one of the most charitable and judicious things that
could be done at that time, for this drove the people from haunting
the doors of every disperser of bills, and from taking down blindly and
without consideration poison for physic and death instead of life.

This direction of the physicians was done by a consultation of the whole
College; and, as it was particularly calculated for the use of the poor
and for cheap medicines, it was made public, so that everybody might see
it, and copies were given gratis to all that desired it. But as it is
public, and to be seen on all occasions, I need not give the reader of
this the trouble of it.

I shall not be supposed to lessen the authority or capacity of the
physicians when I say that the violence of the distemper, when it came
to its extremity, was like the fire the next year. The fire, which
consumed what the plague could not touch, defied all the application of
remedies; the fire-engines were broken, the buckets thrown away, and the
power of man was baffled and brought to an end. So the Plague defied
all medicines; the very physicians were seized with it, with their
preservatives in their mouths; and men went about prescribing to others
and telling them what to do till the tokens were upon them, and they
dropped down dead, destroyed by that very enemy they directed others to
oppose. This was the case of several physicians, even some of