10. “Bring Out Your Dead” Came From London’s 1665 Outbreak
London suffered another terrible epidemic of the Black Death in 1665. By September of that year, thousands were dying every single week. The city could not keep up with the terrible tide of corpses, and body collectors were once again back in demand. However, the sight of so many corpses being significantly collected upset and terrified the people of London. The city eventually ordered the body collectors to only work under the cover of darkness to avoid further frightening the besieged city.
Working in the dark necessitated the development of calls to alert city dwellers that the dead-carts, as the body collector’s wagons came to be called, were nearby and accepted bodies. Thus the “bring out your dead” call, perhaps now best known for its use in a Monty Python skit, was put into use.
In the 200 years since the first devastating pandemic, advances were made to avoid as much contact with the infectious corpses of victims. Families would often use poles with hooks to lower the bodies to the waiting dead-carts on the street, reducing the amount of physical contact both the family and body collectors had to have with the deceased. A diarist at the time, Samuel Pepys, wrote that he stopped going outside at night due to these practices and his “great fear of meeting dead corpses.”
