The Finger of Trump
on a New Plague
Are we witnessing the beginning of a new plague? Will we, in years to come, need our Daniel Defoe to provide a chronicle of a deadly scourge?
By Roger Kimball • March 7, 2020
Are we about to get a new Journal of the Plague Year? In that 1722 novel, Daniel Defoe’s protagonist gives a detailed, supposedly eyewitness account of the progress of the bubonic plague through London in 1665.
. . . in order to be certain of the truth, two physicians and a surgeon were ordered to go to the house and make inspection. This they did; and finding evident tokens of the sickness upon both the bodies that were dead, they gave their opinions publicly that they died of the plague. Whereupon it was given in to the parish clerk, and he also returned them to the Hall; and it was printed in the weekly bill of mortality in the usual manner, thus—
Plague, 2. Parishes infected, 1.
The people showed a great concern at this, and began to be alarmed all over the town, and the more, because in the last week in December 1664 another man died in the same house, and of the same distemper. And then we were easy again for about six weeks, when none having died with any marks of infection, it was said the distemper was gone; but after that, I think it was about the 12th of February, another died in another house, but in the same parish and in the same manner.
By the end of the novel, 100,000 are dead. Finally, the scourge abates.
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https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/07/the-finger-of-trump-on-a-new-plague/
