Plague: A Very Short Introduction by Paul Slack

Author:Paul Slack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2012-05-09T04:00:00+00:00

Hard choices

The fuller the sources become over time, the easier it is to test the accuracy of those sweeping statements of chroniclers about the havoc created by plague, and to see that the reality for everyone involved in an epidemic was personal stress. They had to weigh concern about their own safety and that of their families against the pull of other obligations and loyalties, inculcated by Christian morality or the everyday ties of friendship, business, and neighbourhood. They faced hard choices. Datini of Prato was one of those perplexed by the issue of flight. His doctor, wife, and friends urged him to escape at the first sign of infection in Tuscany, but business affairs and scruples about deserting his employees held him back. In the end, in 1400, he fled from plague in Florence, and salved his conscience by signing a will on the day he left, giving most of his fortune to charitable purposes, ‘for the love of God’.

Samuel Pepys, a man less susceptible to qualms of conscience than Datini, also found that making his will brought a ‘much better state’ to his soul in 1665, and faced similar practical problems. Detained in London by government business, he consulted the bills of mortality to judge the danger of infection in particular localities, noted its concentration in the poorest parishes, and kept away from infected houses and corpses in the street until he could no longer avoid them and ‘came almost to think nothing’ of such things, ‘this disease making us more cruel to one another than dogs’. He moved his wife out of town to Woolwich early in July as soon as plague reached his own neighbourhood, and when his doctor died from it in late August and the quarantine of sick households seemed to have wholly broken down, he quickly joined her, going into London only when urgent business dictated.

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