ut
at their windows, shooting themselves, etc.; mothers murdering their own
children in their lunacy; some dying of mere grief as a passion, some of
mere fright and surprise without any infection at all; others frighted
into idiotism[139] and foolish distractions, some into despair and
lunacy, others into melancholy madness.

The pain of the swelling was in particular very violent, and to some
intolerable. The physicians and surgeons may be said to have tortured
many poor creatures even to death. The swellings in some grew hard, and
they applied violent drawing plasters, or poultices, to break them; and,
if these did not do, they cut and scarified them in a terrible manner.
In some, those swellings were made hard, partly by the force of the
distemper, and partly by their being too violently drawn, and were so
hard that no instrument could cut them; and then they burned them with
caustics, so that many died raving mad with the torment, and some in the
very operation. In these distresses, some, for want of help to hold them
down in their beds or to look to them, laid hands upon themselves as
above; some broke out into the streets, perhaps naked, and would run
directly down to the river, if they were not stopped by the watchmen or
other officers, and plunge themselves into the water wherever they found
it.

It often pierced my very soul to hear the groans and cries of those who
were thus tormented. But of the two, this was counted the most promising
particular in the whole infection: for if these swellings could be
brought to a head, and to break and run, or, as the surgeons call it, to
"digest," the patient generally recovered; whereas those who, like the
gentlewoman's daughter, were struck with death at the beginning, and had
the tokens come out upon them, often went about indifferently easy till
a little before they died, and some till the moment they dropped down,
as in apoplexies and epilepsies is often the case. Such would be taken
suddenly very sick, and would run to a bench or bulk, or any convenient
place that offered itself, or to their own houses, if possible, as I
mentioned before, and there sit down, grow faint, and die. This kind of
dying was much the same as it was with those who die of common
mortifications,[140] who die swooning, and, as it were, go away in a
dream. Such as died thus had very little notice of their being infected
at all till the gangrene was spread through their whole body; nor could
phy