JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Six days before Christmas in 1665, the city of London and environs had suffered through more than a year of the Bubonic plague: the Great Plague of London, killer of 100,000+ people to that point. It was in this preceding week that the annual report of deaths in the city of London were reported in this very grim bill of mortality:
[Image source: Wikicommons]
The great and somewhat mysterious A Journal of the Plague Year, by Daniel Dafoe (1660-1731), which was published in March 1722, was based somewhat on the details of Loimologia, or, an historical Account of the Plague in London in 1665, With precautionary Directions against the like Contagion written by Dr. Nathaniel Hodges (1629-1668), which was a factual account of the plague. Dafoe's account may or may not have been fiction, and many have seen it as a sort of early nonfiction novel, while others reckon it as a work not so much as fiction but fictionalized nonfiction edited by Dafoe. In any event it is very compelling reading. (The full text of the Dafoe is found at Project Gutenberg, here.]
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