Don’t Come Any Closer（excerpt） 请君勿近（节选） Jill Lepore 吉尔·莱波雷 作 When the plague came to London in 1665, Londoners lost their wits. They consulted astrologers, quacks, the Bible. They searched their bodies for signs, tokens of the disease: lumps, blisters, black spots. They begged for prophecies; they paid for predictions; they prayed; they yowled. They closed their eyes; they covered their ears. They wept in the street. They read alarming almanacs: “Certain it is, books frighted them terribly.”The government, keen to contain the panic, attempted“to suppress the Printing of such Books as terrify’d the People,”according to Daniel Defoe, in “A Journal of the Plague Year” , a history that he wrote in tandem with an advice manual called “Due Preparations for the Plague” , in 1722, a year when pe…