for
coaches, they were scarce used, but to carry sick people to the
pesthouse and to other hospitals, and some few to carry physicians to
such places as they thought fit to venture to visit; for really coaches
were dangerous things, and people did not care to venture into them,
because they did not know who might have been carried in them last; and
sick infected people were, as I have said, ordinarily carried in them to
the pesthouses; and sometimes people expired in them as they went along.

It is true, when the infection came to such a height as I have now
mentioned, there were very few physicians who cared to stir abroad to
sick houses, and very many of the most eminent of the faculty[164] were
dead, as well as the surgeons also; for now it was indeed a dismal time,
and for about a month together, not taking any notice of the bills of
mortality, I believe there did not die less than fifteen or seventeen
hundred a day, one day with another.

One of the worst days we had in the whole time, as I thought, was in
the beginning of September, when, indeed, good people were beginning to
think that God was resolved to make a full end of the people in this
miserable city. This was at that time when the plague was fully come
into the eastern parishes. The parish of Aldgate, if I may give my
opinion, buried above one thousand a week for two weeks, though the
bills did not say so many; but it[165] surrounded me at so dismal a
rate, that there was not a house in twenty uninfected. In the Minories,
in Houndsditch, and in those parts of Aldgate Parish about the Butcher
Row, and the alleys over against me,--I say, in those places death
reigned in every corner. Whitechapel Parish was in the same condition,
and though much less than the parish I lived in, yet buried near six
hundred a week, by the bills, and in my opinion near twice as many.
Whole families, and indeed whole streets of families, were swept away
together, insomuch that it was frequent for neighbors to call to the
bellman to go to such and such houses and fetch out the people, for that
they were all dead.

And indeed the work of removing the dead bodies by carts was now grown
so very odious and dangerous, that it was complained of that the bearers
did not take care to clear such houses where all the inhabitants were
dead, but that some of the bodies lay unburied till the neighboring
families were offended by the stench, and consequently infected. And
this neglect of th