t, and
sick, infected people were, as I have said, ordinarily carried in them
to the pest-houses, 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 which cared to stir abroad to
sick houses, and very many of the most eminent of the faculty 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 1500 or 1700 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 began 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 a thousand a week for two weeks, though the bills did not
say so many;--but it 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.
Whitechappel parish was in the same condition, and though much less than
the parish I lived in, yet buried near 600 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 neighbours 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 dear such houses where all the inhabitants were
dead, but that sometimes the bodies lay several days unburied, till the
neighbouring families were offended with the stench, and consequently
infected; and this neglect of the officers was such that the
churchwardens and constables were summoned to look after it, and even
the justices of the Hamlets were obliged to venture their lives among
them to quicken and encourage them, for innumerable of the bearers died
of the distemper, infected by the bodies they were obliged to come so
near. And had it not been that the number of poor people