http://www.mrbaugher.com/uploads/1/8/3/6/18362941/u3_journal_plague_se.pdf
The Journal is rife with stories of human suffering, both physical and psychological. Readers cannot help but be affected by the pervasive and continuous examples of despair, pain, and grief. In regards to physical suffering, Defoe concentrates on the terrible pain of the swellings on the afflicted person's body. These swellings would grow so hard and taut that they could not be burst by normal exertions; people frantically tried to burst them by stabbing or burning them. Sometimes the pain was so excruciating that people ran about the streets, crazed and screaming. Others committed suicide. In regards to psychological suffering, parents grieved for their dead children and children yearned for their parents. Infants nursed at the breasts of their dead mothers, or mothers watched their children die in their arms. Many people could not work and had to endure starvation. The shutting up of houses added to the despair, for people could not handle being imprisoned in their houses of death. The inscrutability of the plague, and the inability to know how it was spread or how to protect oneself from it, made people frenzied and insane.
