The disappearance of plague: a continuing puzzle.
T THE most feared disease in early modern England was plague. Before its disappearance from England in i666,2 plague had for centuries been a dreaded visitor to the larger towns and cities of the kingdom. When an epidemic broke out in a city like London, the entire tenor of life changed. Many of the better-off inhabitants fled to the country to escape infection; commerce and industry stagnated; the usually teeming streets were empty. During the great London epidemic of i665, Samuel Pepys lamented, "Lord, what a sad time it is, to see no boats upon the River-and grass grow all up and down Whitehall-court-and nobody but poor wretches in the streets."3 As if to celebrate the relentless advance of death, the bells of the parish churches rang out at each death and each burial. To contemporaries, it seemed that God was venting his wrath on a sinful mankind. In London and other great urban concentrations of Europe, the loss of life from plague was terrible. According to the Bills of Mortality, 70,594 persons died of plague in London during the epidemic of I 665-6. The actual figure was higher, because many plague deaths were mistakenly attributed to other diseases, and it has been estimated that this one epidemic claimed 8o,ooo victims, out of a total