Loimographia: an account of the Great Plague of London in the year 1665. Now first printed from the British Museum Sloan MS. 349, for the Epidemiological Society of London / By William Boghurst... ; Edited by Joseph Frank Payne.

  • Boghurst, William.
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Loimographia: an account of the Great Plague of London in the year 1665. Now first printed from the British Museum Sloan MS. 349, for the Epidemiological Society of London / By William Boghurst... ; Edited by Joseph Frank Payne. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    OF THE PLAGUE AND ITS CAUSE, WITH SOMETHING CONGEKNING EOEMER PLAGUES. As Death which is stiled by Job the King of Terrors, soe all diseases the precursors of it are the fruits of the first curse denounced upon man for his apostasy and disobedience to God, and noe disease in the great Army of diseases which assault our life is more dreadfull and deadly than that of the pestilence; hence it hath gained the name of Death in the Chaldee Paraphrase and version of the Septuagint, the name of mortality among Ecclesiasticall writers and fathers of the Church, and hath retained this name in our own mother tongue. This Disease hath raged and made sad havocke in the world, sometymes more universally spreading itselfe through most places of the known earth, sometymes more particularly fixeing upon one City or Eegion. Of universall or oecumenicall Plagues the most spreading and destructive that I have met with in History are these four. First that of Athens, which fell out in the Pelopo- nesian War in the yeare of the world 3520, before Christ 428, described most fully by that eminent Historian Thucydides in his second booke, who had beene sick of it himself, but restored, and from him by that great promoter and enlightener of the Epicurean or Corpuscular Philosophy, the Poet Lucretius, in the last part of his last booke. This Plague, though it bee vulgarly called the Athenian Plague because it did great execution there in that City, yet indeed not on Athens alone, but as Thucydides tells us, beginning at .-S^thiopia, overran Affricke and transferred itself into Asia and thence into Europe. The second furious or oecumenicall Plague which hath occurred in my Pteading was in the Raigne of Vibius Gallus and Volusianus his sonne, according to Calvisius, in the year of the world 4302, of Christ 253. This Plague is also related to have its Originall in Ethiopia, and from thence to have diffused itself into all the Provinces of the Roman Empire, and to have lasted 15 yeares without intermission. How it raged in Alexandria andiEgypt wee understand from an Epistle of Dionysius, the bishop of that city at that tyme.