« It takes a plague to know a plague » may be said both of the principle of inoculation and of the historiography of epidemics. Certainly this was true of Daniel Defoe’s book, The TournaI of the Plaugue Year, which was ostensibly about the Great Plague of London in 1665 but which actually was contribution to the planning of the plague in 1721 when both the bubonic plague and the smallpox re-appeared in Europe and the western Atlantic. In 1721 the bubonic plague appeared in Marseilles where it was met with religious piety and repressive quarantine. In the Dutch ports cargoes were…