He says, "If I entered into a chamber which had been uninhabited for months, I was immediately seized with a fever." He ascribed the fearful plague of the sweating sickness to this cause.

So, too, the noted Dr.Caius advised sanitary precautions against the plague, and in after-generations, Mead, Pringle, and others urged them; but the prevailing thought was too strong, and little was done.
Even the floor of the presence chamber of Queen Elizabeth in Greenwich Palace was "covered with hay, after the English fashion," as one of the chroniclers tells us.
In the seventeenth century, aid in these great scourges was mainly sought in special church services.

The foremost English churchmen during that century being greatly given to study of the early fathers of the Church; the theological theory of disease, so dear to the fathers, still held sway, and this was the case when the various visitations reached their climax in the great plague of London in 1665, which swept off more than a hundred thousand people from that city.

The attempts at meeting it by sanitary measures were few and poor; the medical system of the time was still largely tinctured by superstitions resulting from medieval modes of thought; hence that plague was generally attributed to the Divine wrath caused by "the prophaning of the Sabbath." Texts from Numbers, the Psalms, Zechariah, and the Apocalypse were dwelt upon in the pulpits to show that plagues are sent by the Almighty to punish sin; and perhaps the most ghastly figure among all those fearful scenes described by De Foe is that of the naked fanatic walking up and down the streets with a pan of fiery coals upon his head, and, after the manner of Jonah at Nineveh, proclaiming woe to the city, and its destruction in forty days.
That sin caused this plague is certain, but it was sanitary sin.

Both before and after this culmination of the disease cases of plague were constantly occurring in London throughout the seventeenth century; but about the beginning of the eighteenth century it began to disappear.