Note 28 — QUARANTINE AND CONTAGION.

Dr W. H. Burrell, Deputy Inspector-general of Hospitals, who was three years Principal Medical Officer at Malta, presented, in 1852, to the General Board of Health, an elaborate examination on the plague which had formerly raged in that island. The following are the conclusions to which he had arrived:—

“1. There is no evidence to prove, or even to render it probable, that the plague was introduced either into Malta in 1813 or into Gozo in 1814 by importation.

“2. There is every reason to believe that the plague existed in Malta at the time of the arrival of the ship supposed to have introduced the disease; and that in Gozo the first case (a stranger) contracted the disease from local causes, which enhanced by quarantine, produced it in others.

“3. The lower orders, and those occupying the lowest, most crowded, and worst ventilated dwellings, furnished the great majority of cases; which decreased in proportion with improvement in these respects.

“4. As this discriminative preference of the disease to attack certain classes, living in certain localities, never obtains to the same extent with diseases arising from a specific contagion, it is more than probable that the causes engaged in the generation of the plague are not constant, but variable and accidental; its initial cause, the peculiar atmospheric constitution, having no power to develop the disease, unassisted by season and local conditions.

“5. The transmissibility of plague from person to person out of the noxious atmosphere in which it originated—the only certain test of such a power—has not been proved by the four instances, during thirty-eight years, in which it is alleged to have been communicated to persons employed by the Quarantine Department of Malta, carbuncular affections being endemic among the population of this island.

“6. Quarantine restrictions enforced by the penalties of corporal punishment and death, and seconded by the greatest dread of contact with suspected persons or things, among the panic-struck populations of Malta and Gozo, utterly failed to arrest the progress of plague; on the contrary, where these restrictions were carried to their utmost limits by an absolute power, there the disease persisted longest, and the mortality was greatest.”

“All these circumstances,” says the French Dr Chervin, speaking of the restrictions and cruelties of quarantine, “are calculated to fill with horror the breast of every feeling and honest man; and we are really obliged to offer violence to ourselves in not giving vent to our indignation against the partisans of contagion, who yet desire to continue to defend their erroneous opinions, and who, to this day, have used all their efforts to make obscure and disfigure the subject, to the great detriment of truth;—who have never ceased to deceive governments, which think it their duty, with regard to this disease [Yellow Fever], to surrender themselves to the judgment and knowledge of medical men,—who have never ceased to describe it as contagious, and have induced those authorities to adopt, with respect to it, the most false and contrary measures, and to neglect the suitable, prophylactic, and preservative means, and others which might have put an end to the disastrous epidemics of this disease;—thus it is they have always acted contrary to truth, to the interest of governments and of humanity.”

“I am of opinion,” says Dr Reece, of New York, “that the oppressive features of our quarantine system should be reckoned among the relics of barbarism which an enlightened Legislature should make haste to abrogate for the sake of our character as a people. There is no pretext for the perpetuation of a system founded in ignorance, and fruitful only in public and private injustice, cruelty, and wrong.”

“Cholera,” says Professor Caldwell, of America, “though a fatal scourge to the world, will, through the wise beneficent dispensation under which we live, be productive of consequences favourable alike to science and humanity. Besides being instrumental in throwing much light on the practice of physic, it will prove highly influential in extinguishing the belief in pestilential contagion, and bringing into disrepute the quarantine establishments that have hitherto existed.”