Diseased London:  Introduction

In the seventeenth century many people attributed events like the outbreak of plague to the effects of human sin.  This was not the only response: the Crown and the local authorities tried to improve sanitation and limit the spread of infection by killing stray dogs who were thought to spread disease, and quarantining plague victims in their houses.  Various medical and folk remedies were also suggested.  But during every outbreak the clergy and other moralists railed against abuses allegedly responsible for bringing divine punishment down on the metropolis. Physical disease was closely associated with moral disorder.

Even among people who doubted a causal connection between sin and disease, immorality was commonly perceived as a kind of infection that tended to spread from person to person until it threatened to engulf whole communities. Moreover certain social and moral problems common within the metropolis did spread disease: prostitution increased the incidence of syphilis, while poor crowded alleys facilitated not only crime but contagion.  All of this contributed to an image of London as a diseased city, fleshed out and developed through discourses associating sickness with specific moral, religious and political problems, including sexual immorality, popery and heresy and economic crimes.  This section explores some of these associations between moral disorder, physical disease and other calamities like the Fire of 1666 that contemporaries also blamed on sin.

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