Page "Quarantine" Paragraph 35

The plague had disappeared from England, never to return, for more than thirty years before the practice of quarantine against it was definitely established by the Quarantine Act 1710 ( 9 Ann.

) The first act was called for, owing to an alarm, lest plague should be imported from Poland and the Baltics ; the second act of 1721 was due to the disastrous prevalence of plague at Marseille and other places in Provence, France ; it was renewed in 1733 owing to a fresh outbreak of the malady on the continent of Europe, and again in 1743, owing to the disastrous epidemic at Messina.

In 1752 a rigorous quarantine clause was introduced into an act regulating the Levantine trade ; and various arbitrary orders were issued during the next twenty years to meet the supposed danger of infection from the Baltics.

Although no plague cases ever came to England all those years, the restrictions on traffic became more and more stringent ( following the movements of medical dogma ), and in 1788 a very oppressive Quarantine Act was passed, with provisions affecting cargoes in particular.

The first year of the nineteenth century marked the turning-point in quarantine legislation ; a parliamentary committee sat on the practice, and a more reasonable act arose on their report.

In 1805 there was another new act, and in 1823 – 24 again an elaborate inquiry followed by an act making the quarantine only at discretion of the privy council, and at the same time recognizing yellow fever or other highly infectious disorder as calling for quarantine measures along with plague.

The steady approach of cholera in 1831 was the last occasion in England of a thoroughgoing resort to quarantine restrictions.

The pestilence invaded every country of Europe despite all efforts to keep it out.

In England the experiment of hermetically sealing the ports was not seriously tried when cholera returned in 1849, 1853 and 1865 – 66.

In 1847 the privy council ordered all arrivals with clean bills from the Black Sea and the Levant to be admitted to free pratique, provided there had been no case of plague during the voyage ; and therewith the last remnant of the once formidable quarantine practice against plague may be said to have disappeared.