Page:Remarks on the British quarantine laws - Maclean - 1823.pdf/24

434 fication was practised, and where it was not." p. 282.

Thus, notwithstanding the confidence and solemnity, with which masses of regulations have been obtruded on the world, to prevent the propagation of a nonentity, even those who have most strongly recommended them, are to be found acknowleging, in point of fact, their inefficiency. But in the observation which I have quoted, Dr. Russell is quite wrong. The difference is both great and observable between cities where purification is practised, and where it is not; but it is, cæteris paribus, strongly in favor of those places, where no precautions are employed by public authorities, to prevent the propagation of an imaginary virus, and in which the doctrine of contagion, in epidemic diseases, is either not known, or not believed, by the people, or by the faculty.

"In the 16th and 17th centuries," says the same writer (Treat. p. 478), “the orders and regulations respecting the infected, seem to have been issued in royal proclamations, or by the municipal officers, in towns; and in the country, by the justices of the peace; but all under the sanction of the king in council. How it was ma red in times still more remote," he adds, “does not appear." It certainly does not appear; for this very sufficient reason, that, “in times still more remote," it was not managed at all. The precautions of 1582 are, in respect to England, the earliest we find upon record; and they were not imperative, but simply recommendatory. That year being a year of plague in London, the lord treasurer sent an order to Sir Thomas Blanke, the Lord Mayor, to make a catalogue of all the victualling houses that were infected, to set up publicly, that all strangers resorting to London might avoid setting ups or lodging at those houses; and so to do, from two months to two months. (City Remembrancer, i. 263.) This is the first measure that I have met with in the shape of an official interference in England, concerning pestilence, as presumed to depend upon contagion: and, it is to be remarked, that there was here no compulsion, either in respect to shutting up of houses, or to removing of persons supposed to be infected from their houses, to be sent to lazarettos or pest houses. It was nothing but a simple warning to strangers, to avoid places supposed to be infected; and this appears to have reference, according to the ancient and proper meaning of the word, to “infection" of the air, with which contagion was never until lately confounded. It was not until 1592 that, by an order in council, issued by Queen Elizabeth, sick persons were ordered to be confined to their houses, which appears to have been the first compulsory measure of the kind. (Orders of Queen Elizabeth, in 1592.)

On the 30th of July 1603, being a year of plague in London,