Two years later Donne was one of the victims of an epidemic of relapsing fever. His urgent wish to record this experience, even when lying near to death, maddened by the tolling of the city bells, gave us the Devotions & Meditations, with its reminder that No Man is an Island.
Donne remained grimly aware of the plight of those in the City outside who were not as privileged as he.
How many are sicker than I and laid in their woeful straw at home (if that corner be a home) and have no more hope of help, though they die, than of getting a good job if they live?
They no more expect to see a physician than to be an officer after. The first person who takes notice is the sexton who buries them, buries them in oblivion too.
For they do but fill up the number of the dead in the statistics and we shall never hear their names till we read them in the Book of Life with our own.
How many are sicker than I and thrown into hospitals where (as fish left upon the sand must wait for the tide) they must wait for the physicians hour of visiting and then can be but visited?
How many are sicker than all of us and have no hospital to cover them, no straw to lie in, to die in, but have their gravestone under them? They breathe out their souls in the ears and in the eyes of passersby, harder than their bed, the flint of the street.
They taste of no part of our physick but a sparing diet, to whom ordinary porridge would be Julep enough, the refuse of our servants Bezar enough, and the off-scouring of our kitchen tables cordial enough.
O my soul, when thou art not enough awake to bless thy God enough for his plentiful mercy in affording thee many helpers, remember how many lack them and help them to them, or to those other things which they lack as much as them
