uite away.

It is indeed to be observed that the women were in all this calamity
the most rash, fearless, and desperate creatures, and as there were vast
numbers that went about as nurses to tend those that were sick, they
committed a great many petty thieveries in the houses where they were
employed; and some of them were publicly whipped for it, when perhaps
they ought rather to have been hanged for examples, for numbers of
houses were robbed on these occasions, till at length the parish
officers were sent to recommend nurses to the sick, and always took
an account whom it was they sent, so as that they might call them to
account if the house had been abused where they were placed.

But these robberies extended chiefly to wearing-clothes, linen, and what
rings or money they could come at when the person died who was under
their care, but not to a general plunder of the houses; and I could give
you an account of one of these nurses, who, several years after, being
on her deathbed, confessed with the utmost horror the robberies she
had committed at the time of her being a nurse, and by which she had
enriched herself to a great degree. But as for murders, I do not find
that there was ever any proof of the facts in the manner as it has been
reported, except as above.

They did tell me, indeed, of a nurse in one place that laid a wet cloth
upon the face of a dying patient whom she tended, and so put an end to
his life, who was just expiring before; and another that smothered a
young woman she was looking to when she was in a fainting fit, and would
have come to herself; some that killed them by giving them one thing,
some another, and some starved them by giving them nothing at all. But
these stories had two marks of suspicion that always attended them,
which caused me always to slight them and to look on them as mere
stories that people continually frighted one another with. First, that
wherever it was that we heard it, they always placed the scene at the
farther end of the town, opposite or most remote from where you were to
hear it. If you heard it in Whitechappel, it had happened at St Giles's,
or at Westminster, or Holborn, or that end of the town. If you heard
of it at that end of the town, then it was done in Whitechappel, or the
Minories, or about Cripplegate parish. If you heard of it in the city,
why, then it happened in Southwark; and if you heard of it in Southwark,
then it was done in the city, and the like.