A Journal of the Plague Year, Written by a Citizen Who Continued All the While in London

by Daniel Defoe

Another thing might render the country more strict with respect to the citizens, and especially with respect to the poor, and this was what I hinted at before: namely, that there was a seeming propensity or a wicked inclination in those that were infected to infect others. There have been great debates among our physicians as to the reason of this. Some will have it to be in the nature of the disease, and that it impresses every one that is seized upon by it with a kind of a rage, and a hatred against their own kind—as if there was a malignity not only in the distemper to communicate itself, but in the very nature of man, prompting him with evil will or an evil eye, that, as they say in the case of a mad dog, who though the gentlest creature before of any of his kind, yet then will fly upon and bite any one that comes next him, and those as soon as any who had been most observed by him before. Others placed it to the account of the corruption of human nature, who cannot bear to see itself more miserable than others of its own species, and has a kind of involuntary wish that all men were as unhappy or in as bad a condition as itself.