of pestilence and contagion. In Greece and Rome the public officers bore much similarity, in office and duties, with our boards of health; citizens were separated from those infected with leprosy, the ancient plague, and the cattle of herds tainted with a murrain were carefully secluded from contact with others, or killed to secure the general safety. If the quarantine of Romans was less stringent than that of their flocks, it must be ascribed partly to the general disregard of human life, which rendered the lion more valuable than the gladiator, and common cattle than common men.

To the ignorance of physicians is also to be ascribed the fact that no more effectual measures than the kindling of large fires of vine-stalks, laurel, and wormwood, to purify the air, were employed to check an epidemic. Sanitary science was, as it ever has been, secondary to quarantine; and the doctrine of an invader from abroad more popular than the theory of the endemic and domestic origin of disease.

Although Viscount Bernabo, of Reggio, in Italy, as early as 1374, had enforced certain stringent regulations in regard to the plague, then prevalent, such as that "every plague-patient be taken out of the city into the fields, there to die or recover," - yet no real system of quarantine laws was devised, until commerce had begun to link together strange countries by a common bond of interest and intercourse. It was at Venice, the first truly maritime city, that quarantine was invented; and the laws then established have formed the basis of all similar systems since that time. Whoever visits Venice now can but be surprised that the city should be so healthy as it is. The slimy walls, the moisture of all the lower stories of the houses, the narrow, dark canals of water by no means clean, and the odors of the lagunes, which are very perceptible in summer, would seem to combine to render it the home of periodical fever and cholera. Yet such it is far from being. And its exemption from disease must be ascribed to two reasons, to the fact that a salt-water tide ebbs and flows in all its streets, and to the care used in its construction, that all its canals and drains might be swept clean by the sea. In such a city it was, living by commerce alone, and rising in wealth and splendor, as its trade increased, from a few huts

of reeds to a proud Republic, that the intimate connection with the pestilential regions of the eastern shores of the Mediterranean suggested to its inhabitants the need of a sanitary cordon to secure its ports from the entrance of pestladen ships. In 1448, the Senate of Venice instituted a code of quarantine. This code obliged all ships arriving from suspected places to undergo a term of probation before they could be allowed to enter the port and discharge their cargoes. Individuals were similarly treated. Here is the germ and the essence of quarantine. A few years anterior to the passage of these laws, the first regularly organized lazaretto, or pesthouse, was established. It was erected on a small island near the city. All persons arriving from places where the plague was suspected were there detained. The sick from the city, laboring under the disease, were sent thither with their families, and were detained forty days after their cure.

The Republic of Venice also established the first board of health. It consisted of three nobles, and was called the Council of Health. It was ordered to investigate the best means of preserving health, and of preventing the introduction. of disease from abroad. Its efforts not having been entirely successful, its powers were enlarged in 1504, so as to grant it "the power of life and death over those who violated the regulations for health." No appeal was allowed from the sentence of this tribunal. Bills of health were introduced in 1527. After the example of Venice, quarantines and lazarettos began to multiply among other nations, and this cumbrous, expensive, and restrictive system has been perpetuated for four hundred years.

describe the numerous The panic, the sensequelled by no assur

It is true that no pen can adequately secondary consequences of pestilence. less and almost insane dread, can be ances. Thucydides, Boccaccio, Manzoni, De Foe, and Eugene Sue, each in his turn, have left us descriptions which are among the most graphic of their writings. The gradual gathering of the great catastrophe, and its effects upon commerce, industry, confidence, and honesty; the desolation of the city, and the desertion of its public haunts; the harrowing tales of suffering and stories of individual terror, are nowhere better

unfolded than in the Preface to the Decameron. And we may be pardoned, perhaps, if in this connection we give a single extract from Boccaccio. He is writing of Florence.

"When the evil had become universal, the hearts of all the inhabitants were closed to feelings of humanity. They fled from the sick and all that belonged to them, hoping by these means to save themselves. Some shut themselves up in their houses, with their wives, their children, and household, living on the most costly food, but carefully avoiding all excess. None were allowed access to them; no intelligence of death or sickness was permitted to reach their ears; and they spent their time in singing and music, and other pastimes.

"Others, on the contrary, considered eating and drinking to excess, amusements of all descriptions, the indulgence of every gratification, and an indifference to what was passing around them, as the best medicine, and acted accordingly. They wandered day and night, from one tavern to another, and feasted without moderation or bounds. In this way they endeavored to avoid all contact with the sick, and abandoned their houses and property to chance, like men whose death-knell had already tolled.

"Amid this general lamentation and woe, the influence and authority of every law, human and divine, vanished. Most of those who were in office had been carried off by the plague, or lay sick, or had lost so many members of their families that they were unable to attend to their duties, so that thenceforth every one acted as he thought proper.

"Others, in their mode of living, chose a middle course. They ate and drank what they pleased, and walked abroad, carrying odoriferous flowers, herbs, or spices, which they smelt to from time to time, in order to invigorate the brain, and to avert the baneful influence of the air, infected by the sick, and by the innumerable corpses of those who had died of the plague.

"Others carried their precaution still further, and thought the surest way to escape death was by flight. They therefore left the city; women as well as men abandoning their dwellings and their relations, and retiring into the country. But of these also many were carried off, most of them alone and deserted by all the world, themselves having previously set the example. Thus it was that one citizen fled from another, a neighbor from his neighbors, a relation from his relations; and in the end, so completely had terror extinguished every kindlier feeling, that the brother forsook the brother, the sister the sister, the wife her husband; and at last, even the parent his own offspring, and abandoned them, unvisited and unsoothed, to their fate.

Those, therefore, that stood in need of assistance fell a prey to greedy attendants; who, for an exorbitant recompense, merely handed the sick their food and medicine, remained with them in their last moments, and then not unfrequently became themselves victims to their avarice, and lived not to enjoy their extorted gain. Propriety and decorum were extinguished among the helpless sick. Females of rank seemed to forget their natural bashfulness, and committed the care of their persons, indiscriminately, to men and women of the lowest order. No longer were women, relatives or friends, found in the house of mourning to share the grief of the survivors, no longer was the corpse accompanied to the grave by neighbors and a numerous train of priests, carrying wax tapers and singing psalms, nor was it borne along by other citizens of equal rank. Many breathed their last without a friend to soothe their dying pillow; and few indeed were they who departed amid the lamentations and tears of their friends and kindred. Instead of sorrow and mourning, appeared indifference, frivolity, and mirth; this being considered, especially by the females, as conducive to health.

"Among the middling classes, and especially among the poor, the misery was still greater. Poverty or negligence induced most of these to remain in their dwellings, or in the immediate neighborhood; and thus they fell by thousands; and many ended their lives in the streets, by day and by night. The stench of putrefying corpses was often the first indication to their neighbors that more deaths had occurred. The survivors, to preserve themselves from infection, generally had the bodies taken out of the houses and laid before the doors; where the early morn found them in heaps, exposed to the affrighted gaze of the passing stranger.

three

"It was no longer possible to have a bier for every corpse, or four were generally laid together. Husband and wife, father and mother, with two or three children, were frequently borne to the grave on the same bier."

In 1665, during the plague in London, as we are told by De Foe, the consternation was equally great, and, in the blind hope of checking the disease, "infected houses were not only quarantined and shut up for one month after all the family were dead or recovered, but a guard was placed in front, day and night, to keep out visitors, and a large red cross with the words, 'Lord have mercy upon us,' painted on the door." Even this, we are gravely informed, did not prevent the spread of the epidemic; but how must it have increased the general terror! Of late years the government has withheld the num

ber of deaths when the cholera has visited Paris. This course, to be sure, is open to the objection, that the community is not sufficiently warned for precautionary measures. In all times the panic of contagion has been the same, in every wide-spread epidemic. Fear of the yellow-fever led to an exhibition of equal barbarity among our own citizens in 1819.

"Philadelphia, forgetful of her reputation for kindness and hospitality, with a few cases within her own borders, carried the system of exclusion so far as to prohibit all intercourse with her neighbor, Baltimore, refused a shelter to those who were seeking a refuge from the disease, and denied admittance, or even liberty to pass through, to all who had visited any part of that city.

"New York, at a time when her citizens, struck with terror, were fleeing in every direction from before the face of the disease, when her stores were shut by hundreds, and all business suspended in consequence of it, and when her courts of justice were closed, or removed to other places, for fear of it, ordered a long quarantine upon vessels which arrived from Boston, where scarcely a shop was shut in consequence of the fever, and the regular course of business was not interrupted. And because a gentleman from Boston, after spending seventeen days at the quarantine ground of New York, in preference to remaining longer under the guardianship of her health officers, chose to return to the place which was the source of their fears, he was advertised at New York, and a reward offered for his apprehension, as though he had been a felon. American ships from England were brought to opposite the lazaretto of New York, and obliged to submit to visits of officers fresh from the exposure to the disease, lest peradventure they had brought the plague from Liverpool. Even New Orleans partook of the general terror, and ordered a quarantine, lest the yellow-fever should be imported from Boston. At the same time Boston was equally engaged in enforcing the same precautions towards her sister cities."- North American Review, No. XXVII. (April, 1820).

So is it ever. Even the year just closed has furnished, here in Boston, its wretched examples. In the epidemic which has recently visited us, and which we have enjoyed peculiar facilities for witnessing in the Small-pox Hospital, out of one hundred persons under our charge, several were forced to leave their boarding-houses; one was torn literally from his bed by a selfish landlord; and two were found on the pavement, after being ejected and deserted. One poor young man VOL. XCI.. - No. 189. 38