"The Lord bless them" ""THE PERIWIG MAKER"" "London, 5th September 1665." "I can hear the death bells tolling night and day." "The plague rages dreadfully." "and the weekly bill of mortality must be higher than ever." "Indeed, a good person, like I am, could begin to think... that God was resolved to make a full end of the people in this miserable city." "Bring out the dead!" "Lord Day." "It pleases God that I am still spared." "and very hearty and sound in health, but a bit impatient at being pent up within doors, as I have been for 4 weeks now." "The air remains my greatest worry." "Although I am burning great quantities of coals, whose sulphurous and nitrous particles are assisting to clear and purge the air, the situation does not improve." "Everything all right up there?" "Come on." "We're waiting." "Perhaps I should follow Dr Berwick's advice... and enter into another measure for airing and sweetening my room." "As far as I remember, thereof I have to make a very strong smoke in the room and than open the door and let the air carry it all out with a blast of gunpowder." "Mother." "Go away." "Hey!" "Lock her up!" "But I don't believe in this Turkish predestinarianism, where people think of the contagion being an immediate stroke from heaven... without the agency of means." "Without lessening the awe of the judgement of God," "I am of the opinion that the plague is a distemper arising from natural cause." "In the case of the infection, there is no apparent extraordinary occasion for supernatural operation, as the ordinary course of things appears sufficient." "It is beyond question to me that the calamity is spread by infection." "That is to say, by some uncertain steams or fumes." "which the physicians call effluvia, by the breath, the sweat or the stench of the sores of the sick person." "The effluvia affects the sound, who comes within a certain distance of the sick immediately penetrating the vital parts of the said sound person, putting their blood into an immediate ferment and agitating their spirits." "And I cannot but with some wonder find that some people... talk of infection being carried on the air alone." "Maybe it might be known by the smell of their breath." "But then who durst smell of that breath for his information, since, to know it, he must draw the stench of the plague up into his own brain in order to distinguish the odeor?" "I have heard that it was the opinion of others that it might be distinguished by the party's breathing... upon a piece of glass." "Where the breath condenses, there might be seen by a magnifying glass... living creatures... of strange, monstrous and frightful shapes, such as dragons, snakes, serpents... and devils, horrible to behold." "I came to take my leave of you." "I've got the sickness and I shall die tonight" "Are you disturbed by me?" "Then I'll go home and die there." "Bring out your dead!" "Bring out your dead!" "Stop!" "So in the plague, it came to such a violence that the people sat still looking at one another... and seemed quite abandoned to despair." "But the near view of death... would soon reconcile one man to another... so that another plague year would reconcile all differences." "A close conversing with death... would scum off the gall from our tempers, remove the animosities among us... and bring us to see with different eyes than those with which we looked on things before." ""And it is a wonder what will be the fashion after the plague is done as to perwigs for nobody will dare to buy any haire for fear of the infection." " that it had been cut off of the heads of people dead of the plague."" "Samuel Pepys, 03.09.1665."