Page:Remarks on the British quarantine laws - Maclean - 1823.pdf/9

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Bills of health are certificates, granted to ships, sailing from places subject to pestilence, declaring the state of the public health, as to pestilence, at the period of their departure, for the purpose of regulating the duration of their quarantine at the port of their arrival. They are either clean, foul, or suspected. The operation of these certificates will be found particularly described in my “Results of an Investigation respecting Epidemic Diseases," &c.

Whatever may have been the precise period, at which the practice originated of obliging ships to provide themselves with certificates of health, it is certain that it could not have commenced previous to the middle of the 16th century, i. e., previous to the existence of the ideas upon which such a precaution was founded. The first mention which I find of bills of health, is in Morryson's Travels (p. 241, 243), which state, that an English traveller, who was at Aleppo in 1596, had a clean patent, Syria being then free from the plague. The Levant company, in their answer to the commissioners of customs, dated March 14, 1720, declare, that, up to that period, their ships « not having been obliged to perform quarantine in England, the sole intent of the certificate or bill of health, was to serve them in the Mediterranean." The regulations of the Levant Company, concerning bills of health, are detailed in Russell's “Treatise of the Plague," p. 344. That writer, partial as he was to these institutions, acknowleges them to be defective and insecure (p. 362.) If such precautions, indeed, could ever be of any utility, they would, in respect to the Levant, necessarily be always precarious in their operation, from the uncertainty of the information, upon which they are founded; sickness being concealed, feigned, or exaggerated, according to the presumed interests of the Reporters, who are generally natives, and for the most part commercial speculators. Mr. Green, for many years Treasurer of the Levant Company, in his evidence before the committee of the House of Commons, in 1819, says, « the bills of health are determined by the foreign consuls at Smyrna, upon the report of a number of Greek merchants, who form a committee for the purpose. These merchants carried on principally the trade between Smyrna and Holland, that is, several were concerned; it was their interest to establish foul bills of health, in order to keep the trade to themselves, because English