Forty Days

Quarantine and the Traveller, c. 1700 – c. 1900

John Booker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000451092
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Forty Days: Quarantine and the Traveller, c. 1700 –1900 provides a timely reminder that no traveller in past centuries could return from the East without spending up to 40 days in a lazaretto to ensure that no symptoms of plague were developing. Quarantine was performed in virtual prisons ranging from mud huts in the Danube basin to a converted fort on Malta, evoking every emotion from hatred and hostility through to resignation and even contentment. Drawing on the diaries and journals of some 300 men and women of many nationalities over more than two centuries, the author describes the inadequate accommodation, poor food and crushing boredom experienced by detainees. The book also draws attention to comradeship, sickness, and death in detention, as well as Casanova's unique ability to do what he did best even in the lazaretto of Ancona. Other well-known detainees included Hans Christian Andersen, Mark Twain and Sir Walter Scott. Lavishly illustrated, the work includes a gazetteer of 49 lazarettos in Europe and Asia Minor, with inmates' comments on each. This book will appeal to all those interested in the history of medicine and the history of travel.

1 Reasons, regimes and routes

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195733-2

From the Renaissance until the middle of the nineteenth century, travellers returning to Christendom from the Near East were liable to a disagreeable detention to establish whether or not they bore symptoms of bubonic plague, which was endemic in the Levant.¹ The detention also allowed time for such symptoms, if any, to develop. The rationale for this quarantine was based squarely on the conviction that bubonic plague, that is to say plague characterized by buboes or swellings, was contagious. The boundary between infection and contagion was to some extent blurred (even when knowledge of the Latin roots of both words was widespread), but a contagious disease was deemed primarily to be spread by touch, while an infectious disease was airborne or waterborne. At the end of quarantine detention, a traveller was granted ‘pratique’, or freedom of movement.

In the Middle Ages, there had been no doubt that plague was contagious, and it was not until a severe outbreak attacked Marseilles in 1720 that any anti-contagionist lobby became significant. This movement was briefly encouraged by the illusion that the quarantine facilities at Marseilles were so strict and comprehensive that the plague which escaped from the ship must have been channelled by other means. Opponents of contagion argued that plague was spread by atmospheric conditions, including temperature and humidity, and the ‘miasma’ inhaled from foul smells. There was a degree of common ground with the contagionists, many of whom accepted that a polluted environment – summarized by the physician John Howard, in 1789, as ‘putrid effluvia’ – encouraged the spread of plague, if not its creation.² Both positions were to some extent justified. A century later it was discovered that plague was passed by the bite of infected fleas living on rats, so it was neither infectious nor contagious in the literal sense of those terms. But if the anti-contagionists were correct in asserting that plague was not passed by casual touch, it was also true that, if sufferers were efficiently quarantined, an outbreak could be contained.

Grisly epidemics in Messina (1743) and Malta (1813), when added to the infamous ravage of Marseilles just mentioned, ensured that bubonic plague was always the most dreaded disease. But in the nineteenth century came two other fearsome scourges. The earlier was yellow fever, originally thought to be confined to the West Indies. But when a virulent epidemic spread through southern Iberia in 1803, medical opinion – although divided as usual – concluded that the disease had arrived nearer to home. Quarantine was used against it, not with any confidence but because no other defence was available. From the same negative reasoning, quarantine was used later against the second killer disease, which was cholera morbus, of which the first pandemic was in the 1830s. This was a far greater threat than yellow fever and caused many more deaths. But the disease was quickly understood, and sanitary improvements in urban slums were soon recognized as more effective in stopping the spread than quarantine could ever be.

Nevertheless, cholera affected quarantine in three ways. First, it meant that detentions (useless though they were) became as common on a west-to-east journey in western Europe as they were on an east-to-west. Secondly, as the disease became ubiquitous it was impossible to forecast the next point of attack, so that detentions were established on inland boundaries and indeed between one part of a country and another, where they had never existed for plague. And thirdly, it gave Turkey and the Mediterranean lands which it dominated (notably Egypt and Syria) a reason to establish quarantine stations against western Europe. This is a significant point because it underlines the religious differences between East and West. Christendom had traditionally been dismayed by the fatalistic doctrine in Muslim countries which would not allow the prevention of plague or even its treatment. Some western commentators wondered why the religious scruples of the Ottoman Empire which had prevented quarantine against the plague did not also apply to cholera.

Sultan Mahmud II asked Britain in 1831 for plans of a quarantine station which might be built in Turkey on European principles.³ The British in London, who had no idea how a lazaretto worked, asked the governor of colonial Malta to arrange the necessary briefing as the island had a long tradition of quarantine and a good reputation among travellers. This intervention went well initially, but it was another four or five years before buildings appeared on the shores of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, after which they proliferated. Dr John Davy, writing in 1842, noted 50 Turkish quarantine stations staffed by Turkish directors and European doctors and mostly unfit for their purpose.⁴

The earliest quarantine measures anywhere are thought to have arisen at Venice in 1348. These were against arrivals from Turkey, and they were enhanced in 1423. But in the Turkey trade, Venice was soon eclipsed by Livorno (Leghorn in English), while the French finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, made Marseilles a compulsory quarantine port in the late seventeenth century for the burgeoning trade of France with the Levant. Thereafter, Marseilles and Leghorn maintained the leadership of the quarantine ports, vying with each other to dominate a clique in which Genoa, Ancona, Malta, Messina and later Trieste were also significant players. These ports corresponded with each other, swapping facts, intelligence and rumours about outbreaks of disease at home and abroad and administering their rules with precision and severity.⁵

As time passed, most ports of the northern or Christian shores of the Mediterranean had some kind of quarantine provision. They were anxious to avoid censure from the larger ports, especially Marseilles, if they were perceived as a weak link in the international defences. The penalty for too lax an administration was a punitive delay for ships from the ‘guilty’ ports arriving in the harbours of the clique. The apparatus of quarantine was often continued simply because ports were too timid to abolish it. William Baxter noted in 1849:

‘We are aware that the reason assigned for continuing the quarantine at Malta is, that were it abolished there, Naples, France, Tuscany, and other powers would place all ships arriving from that island on the same footing as ships from the Levant.’⁶

To understand this better and to appreciate what the traveller was up against, it must be explained how quarantine was controlled. The organization in continental Europe differed markedly from that in Britain. There were also differences between countries within the mainland, but these were minor compared with the features they had in common. Policy ultimately stemmed from the king, grand duke, senate or other parliament in which the port was located, but the involvement of these higher echelons was nominal. In practice, quarantine was run by a local board of health composed of magistrates and merchants (not doctors) to whom the delegation of powers was absolute. The unaccountability of these bodies and the brutality of their code were shocking to travellers from Britain, where restrictions were haphazard and unpredictable, and most transgressions were met with no more than a fine. In Europe, offenders against quarantine could be summarily executed.

Against the simplistic continental practice, maritime quarantine in Britain was uniquely complicated. Impinging upon trade and foreign policy, it fell under the prerogative of the Crown, which exercised control through the Privy Council. Impositions of quarantine were brief, responding to epidemics on the continent which were generalized as ‘plague’. Some comfort was derived from the country’s island status, but during the reign of Queen Anne, any complacency vanished. Britain was subjected to a sustained risk of bubonic plague arriving from the Baltic, where it had spread rapidly from eastern Europe in a murderous and inexorable march. The prudent Anne took the issue of quarantine to the House of Commons to have her powers strengthened, clarified and confirmed. The resulting act, passed in 1710, was the first in a long series of quarantine statutes by which the power of the Crown was very slowly eroded, although it was not until 1753 that quarantine regulations became permanent.⁷ The dichotomy of control between monarchy and Parliament and the resulting bureaucratic confusion had no parallel elsewhere in Europe. This British idiosyncrasy deserves to be understood but plays an insignificant role in the anecdotes to unfold, because most travellers had performed their quarantine before they got here. From 1896, quarantine in Britain was superseded by medical inspection arranged by port sanitary authorities and so became an institution of last resort. The rest of the world followed in a disjointed manner.

The imposition of quarantine between nations had usually been, to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of maps
• Acknowledgements
• Author’s note
• Glossary
• Introduction
• 1 Reasons, regimes and routes
• 2 Quarantine: the social leveller
• 3 First impressions
• 4 Passing the time
• 5 Reckoning and departure
• Gazetteer: quarantine stations and lazarettos
• Bibliography
• Index