articular families every day. People in the rage of the distemper,
or in the torment of their swellings, which was indeed intolerable,
running out of their own government, raving and distracted, and
oftentimes laying violent hands upon themselves, throwing themselves out
at their windows, shooting themselves &c.; 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 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-plaisters 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 burnt 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 watchman 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 indifferent 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 wa