A Journal Of The Plague Year

The narrator pushes back on the idea that the plague is spread through the air and insists that sick people who believe themselves to be well in fact mostly spread it: “[T]he best Physick against the Plague is to run away from it” (90). He shares two such cases that prove his point: fathers and mothers who killed their whole families, and people who felt only a lack of appetite until they found “Tokens” (90), or gangrenous flesh, on their bodies. The narrator does wonder how the disease spread so slowly at first, and notes that it must have an incubation period of longer than sixty days. Nonetheless, he once again blames carelessness—especially on the part of the poor—for spreading the disease. He returns to the cessation of trade, noting that other countries refused to receive shipments from London, and that rumors made the plague out to be even worse than it was. While London floundered, however, other English ports absorbed some trade in coal and corn until they were struck, too.

The narrator returns to several other rumors about the plague: one being that burning coal and keeping oneself continuously hot fought off the infection.