PLAGUE AND PESTILENCE
IN LITERATURE AND ART

This volume represents substantially the FitzPatrick Lectures which Ihad the privilege of delivering at the Royal College of Physicians in1912. Originally I intended to do no more than gather together into asuccinct record the various memorials and reminders of Pestilence thatI had met with in my wanderings at home and abroad and in my casualincursions into general literature. Insensibly the desire to understandsupplanted the desire merely to record, and the desire to explainsuperseded the endeavour to understand. I have turned my attention,as far as practicable, only to the literary and artistic associationsof Pestilence, but these have inevitably overlapped the confines ofhistory and of medical science. The latter territory has been invadedonly so far as was necessary to ensure a correct orientation to theinquiry. I have thought it wise to let the curtain fall at the endof the eighteenth century, leaving it to my readers to decide whatvestiges of the mentality of distant centuries have survived into thistwentieth. A little reflection on this will afford a most salutarylesson to all of us.

January 1914.