Note 58 — Chapter VII

As soon then as it is known that danger of infection threatens, people shut themselves up in their houses, lay in a stock of provisions of every kind, admit nobody to enter, and suffer nobody to go out: for which purpose the master of the house keeps the key of the street door. A Turk, (and some one is always to be found among the poor) for a small gratuity, purchases and brings every day meat, vegetables, and such things as form no part of the dry stock. All letters are received in vinegar, or over the fumes of nitre and sulphuric acid, or of assafetida, or of burnt feathers and the like. All cats are killed. Bread is aired for a day before being used: meat and vegetables are put in water to soak, and the hairs, &c. are carefully picked off by small tongs. Where a family is large, and has a spacious house or garden, there are no great hardships: as there is only the confinement and the interruption of business to complain of. But they fall very heavily on the poor, whose labour is suspended for so long a period, sometimes six months or more, and who are thus reduced to the miserable alternative of dying of the plague or of hunger. There is one great disadvantage resulting from the strictness of these regulations. No doctor can visit such as are infected; for, if he do, all other patients will refuse him admittance to their houses. If he be a stranger, and consequently a lodger, even the door of his own house would be shut against him. Hence no researches can be made on the disease, no experiments tried: and, excepting what light the French expedition in Egypt may have thrown on it, and the experiments of a few devoted men in the hospitals at Constantinople—mankind is no wiser than it was an age ago. In a word, the plague makes about as much impression in Turkey as a malignant epidemic in England. Its ravages are generally confined to the Mahometans, whose system of fatalism allows them to make use of few or no precautions against it; although there are many who do not hold so strong to their principles but they would willingly shut themselves up if they dared. But the zealots of the Mahometan religion immediately cry shame upon them, and thus compel them to submit to their destiny. Such however have a strong struggle between their fears of death and the dread of imputed dereliction of the tenets of their holy prophet.