A Journal of the Plague Year, by Daniel Defoe.
The year referred to is 1665, with the last great outbreak of the bubonic plague in Great Britain. Defoe was a small boy in that year, but wrote his account in 1722 in the form of a memoir by a London tradesman of the time. Although it is fictionalized, he did much serious research for it, and I understand it is considered fairly accurate.
Not to belabor the point, but much of this seems relevant to our current situation, with travel restrictions, quarantines, and an ever active rumor mill in both that era and our own. Of course, the people of the 17th and 18th centuries were a long way away from germ theory or a modern understanding of hygiene, but there were attempts to address their situation as rationally as they could with the information they had.
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