QUARANTINE.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR.
Alarylebone, 5th June 1849.
Ste—Some experience of your liberality in permitting your opinions to be questioned in your own paper, induces me to offer for admission into it a few re- marks on the article in your number of Saturday last entitled "The Doom of Quarantine." You there endeavour to quality a conclusion deducible from the Report of the Board of Health, that contagion, as hitherto understood, of specific diseases does not exist, and never has existed; and you say, in explanation, that what does exist is merely the natural propagation of diseased on healthy matter, analogous to a puncture from putrid animal virus. With great submission, I do not think either that the Board of Health's conclusion is well founded, or that your qualification meets the objections maintainable against it. if there be no con- tagion at all, except as the Board admit it, how do typhus, smallpox, and other epidemics, ever reach, as they undoubtedly do, places, classes, and persons in all respects out of the category in which alone the Board say contagion can act? If disease can be communicated only to persons not predisposed, as you describe, by inoculation or analogous process, what is the still undoubted contagion of psora, Ines venerea, measles, and some other cutaneous disorders, communicable to all ranks at all times and in all places? I do not see that the nonimportation to England in cotton of disease from an infected country is at all conclusive, if there be a single instance the contrary way; and I would respectfully ask, whether among the "well-selected facts" in favour of the new theory, there are none pro- ducible against it? Any proposition whatever may be proved if you adduce facts only on one aide: the colour of the human race may be proved to be black if you produce only Negroes. Now, your assertion, founded on the Board's selected facts, that the strictest observance of quarantine does not exclude, and that its breach does not superinduce plague, is contradicted not only by the general fact of the permanent existence of plague (the bubo and the petechice) in countries where there is no quarantine, and its nonexistence in countries where there is quarantine— (this you will meet by the assertion that plague is actually always in London !)- but pointedly and specifically by the experience of the last occasion in which plague was in Europe, namely, in Malta and Cefalonia in 1816, wh. n sections of these islands were kept clear of it by segregation, and it was extirpated solely by gradually diminishing enclosure within its locality. These facts, and many more of the same bearing, are contained in Tully's history of that visitation, and in a letter on the subject from Sir Thomas Maitland to Earl Bathunit, perhaps the most conclusive piece of reasoning and evidence ever produced by a statesman and a philosopher. Your account of the origin, propagation, and maintenance of disease, and your deprecation of the anomalies and impostures of quarantine, may be correct, but plague may nevertheless remain specifically and separately contagious; and the conviction to that effect in the minds of the Continental states; will remain im- moveable by any theories or assertions of any authorities whatever. As to the abolition of quarantine not affecting any political interest, I begto remind yet; that when a preliminary move towards such a result was made by Lord Liverpool's Government in 1825, (I think,) almost every Continental state, simultaneously and without concert, threatened, if they did not actually impose, an addition of qua. rantine on all vessels coming from or communicating with England. The opinion of the noncontagionsnesa of plague has been held by many ea. lightened medical men during the last fifty years, beginning, I believe, with a Dr. Maclean at Constantinople; but it has always been refuted, and in no instance more signally than by the production and consequent publication in the news- papers, on the motion of Lord Lauderdale in the House of Lords, of the above- mentioned letter of his brother to Lord Bathurst. I verily believe a repetition of the experiment would again settle the question. And, apologizing for undue but I hope not unnecessary length, I remain, Sir, your obliged and very obedient bumble servant, AUDI Avramtst PARTEnc.
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