From A Journal of the Plague Year

A journal of the plague year accounts the scenes of someone in London during one of the bubonic plague epidemics. He first explains one of the scariest aspects of the infection, the fact that they had no-clue how they could get it as explained in the first paragraph: "One man who may have really received the infection and knows it not, but goes abroad and about as a sound person, may give the plague to a thousand people, and they to great numbers in proportion, and neither the person giving the infection or the persons receiving it know anything of it, and perhaps not feel the effects of it for several days after." Many believed it was the fury of God and people would continue to look towards religion for help. He also says that the only time anyone was even aware that they had the infection was when they started seeing the rings and swelling in their skin. He also describes many of the horrific scenes people had to deal with, often being able to walk outside to find someone fall to the ground dead in the middle of the street or be awoken by the shriek of horror coming from the lady next door finding her husband or master had hung themselves: "O Lord, my old master has hanged himself!." The death caused by the plague was said to be so bad that when people realized they had the plague, they had no other choice but to give up "sit down, grow faint, and die." Death was also common enough that sometimes people were mistaken to already be dead when they were actually passed out from drinking as what happened to the poor piper in the story.
Many people would try to rid themselves with various cures that for one person involved stripping down immediatly and running into the river where he swam violently to the other side, ran all around the town, and swam back, which apparently cured him by wearing away the swelling and rings by physical activity and using the cold water to get rid of the fever in his blood.
The story ends with a stanza celebrating that he has survived the epidemic in "which swept an hundred thousand souls."
The story gives a very descriptive account on what it might have felt like to have to experience a situation like this over an extended period of time.