Mariti says, that in the island of Cyprus, and on the continent of Syria, every European, on the slighted appearance of the plague, after taking the necessary precautions, shuts himself up with his family. The Mahometans alone, more intrepid, go abroad as usual, converse with each other, give such assistance to each other as may be necessary, and often fly to the relief of a Christian when deserted by his friends. This arises from their belief in predestination. The Mahometans of Syria, however, less familiarized with this scourge, make use of some precautions, which were augmented in 1760. They published an ordonnance forbidding every vessel attacked by the plague to enter their ports: but their vigilance in this respect was so remiss, that it was not sufficient to prevent the contagion. The governor of Acre checked the progress of this plague, by giving the inhabitants the means of retiring from its ravages; and these means, though absolutely contrary to the dogmas of the Mahometan religion, were eagerly embraced. The Europeans became their models; and the governor, after deriving from them every necessary information, shut himself up, after their example, together with his numerous family. The mufti alone, being the protector of the Mahometan law, cannot imitate a conduct which that law condemns. Instead of shutting himself up in a prudent confinement, he thundered forth against this new method, reproached the governor for his conduct, and, having treated him as an impious person, threatened him with all the vengeance of Heaven. The governor, however, only laughed at this pious folly of the mufti, and sent a detachment of soldiers to impose on him a fine of two hundred and fifty sequins, for having dared to ascribe to him, in matters of religion, an ignorance, from every suspicion of which his age ought to have secured him.
In the time of plague, the proper precautions are, to shut one’s self closely up, and to receive no provisions or other things, except those on which the plague has no influence. The people of Syria, however, in 1760, admitted every kind of provisions without fear, but not without using certain precautions. They did not receive warm bread; flesh of every kind was thoroughly washed, and milk was strained through a linen cloth, in order to free it from the smallest particle of animal hair. All kinds of pulse were soaked in water, and they abstained from peaches, apricots, and other fruits which are covered with a downy rind. Fowls were cooked out of the house, for fear that some small feather might adhere to them. Flowers were altogether proscribed. Letters were opened by the person who brought them; and they were never read until they had been steeped long enough in vinegar to be purified without effacing the writing. Every thing was received into the house by means of a rope of herbage suspended from a window. The governor employed every precaution which he thought likely to guard him from the contagion; and, by shutting himself closely up, he set an example which the rest of the Mahometans did not neglect to follow. Besides this he caused the streets to be cleansed; and carried his vigilance so far as to forbid the caravans which arrived from Damascus, where the plague swept off four or five thousand people every day, to enter the city. He obliged them to submit to a proof of eight days without the walls, and established regulations of the same kind respecting vessels coming from Alexandria or Damietta. One precaution taken in the time of plague is, to prevent cats from entering houses: an open war is therefore declared against these animals; and, wherever they are found, they are knocked on the head with large clubs. This is a cruelty absolutely necessary; for there is no vehicle that will convey the infection with more certainty or rapidity than the hair of cats. Rats and mice multiply in consequence of their destruction; but there is no instance of their ever having propagated the plague. This disease, when it attacks men, spares quadrupeds and birds. The furs of the one, and the feathers of the other, however, attract and communicate the infection. People ought particularly to keep from goats and sheep; from horses and oxen little is to be apprehended.
All these precautions were sometimes ineffectual. The French at Acre, who there, as well as throughout Syria, are collected into one quarter, used every precaution that could be thought of, yet, on the 30th of March, 1760, five of them were infected. They belonged to the hospital of the Holy Land, and the monks were instantly ordered to shut themselves up. They did so; and eight of them died, one only escaping.
Mr. Howard likewise gives particular accounts of the precautions used in several different countries through which he travelled. In Malta two kinds of quarantine are performed; one for ships with clean bills, the other for those with foul. The former lasts 18 days.[111] The crews and passengers are allowed to buy provisions, and converse by means of enclosures with stone posts and palisadoes. A letter received from a Turkish ship was taken by a pair of iron tongs, dipped in vinegar, put into a case, and laid for about a quarter of an hour on a wire grate under which straw and perfumes had been burnt; after which the letter was taken out and opened by one of the directors. In this island ships with foul bills must perform quarantine eighty days; but, at the end of forty, may change their station. The different kinds of goods are separated and placed in proper order under cover. The cottons are taken out of the bags containing them, and placed on rows of piles on boards, laid on stone pillars about 18 inches from the floors; and, in repacking them they are flung over a man who gets into the bags, and treads down the cotton; the consequence must be the exposing him to great danger, should any infection remain.
Mr. Howard took a voyage to Venice in a ship with a foul bill, on purpose to know every thing relative to the performance of quarantine. “A messenger (says he) came in a gondola to conduct me to the new lazaretto. I was placed, with my baggage, in a boat fastened by a cord ten feet long to another boat in which were six rowers. When I came near the landing place the cord was loosed, and my boat was pushed with a pole on the shore, where I was met by the person appointed to be my guard. Soon after unloading the boat, the sub-prior came and showed me my lodging; a very dirty room, full of vermin, and without table, chair or bed. That day and the next morning I employed a person to wash my room; but this did not remove the offensiveness of it, or prevent that constant head-ach which I had been used to feel in visiting other lazarettos and some of the hospitals in Turky. My guard sent a report of my health to the office, and, on the representation of our consul, I was removed to the old lazaretto. Having brought a letter to the prior from the Venetian ambassador at Constantinople, I hoped now to have had a comfortable lodging. But I was not so happy. The apartment, consisting of an upper and lower room, was no less disagreeable and offensive than the former. I preferred lying in the lower room, on a brick floor, where I was almost surrounded by water. After six days, however, the prior removed me to an apartment in some respects better, and consisting of four rooms. Here I had a pleasant view; but the rooms were without furniture, very dirty, and no less offensive than the sick wards of the worst hospital. The walls of my chamber, not having been cleaned perhaps for half a century, were saturated with infection. I got them washed repeatedly with boiling water, to remove the offensive smell, but without any effect. My appetite failed, and I concluded I was in danger of the slow hospital fever. I proposed whitewashing my room with lime slaked in boiling water, but was opposed by strong prejudices. I got this, however, done one morning through the assistance of the British consul, who supplied me with a quarter of a bushel of fresh lime for that purpose. The consequence was, that my room was immediately rendered so sweet and fresh, that I was able to drink tea in it in the afternoon, and to lie in it the following night. On the next day the walls were dry, as well as sweet, and in a few days I recovered my appetite. This room was lime-whited in November, and in a very rainy season. In the following March, in complaining to the under sheriffs in Newgate of their inattention to the clause which orders this in the act of parliament for securing the health of prisoners, their excuse was, that they were afraid of dampness.”
An health-office was established at Venice in 1448, in the midst of a very destructive pestilence. The old and new lazarettos are both built on little islands, surrounded not only by canals, but high walls. They have only a ground floor, and one over it, and are divided and subdivided into a great number of apartments, each having an open court in front, with plats of grass, which is not suffered to grow too high; nor are any trees suffered to grow within this district, or a good way from it. The internal government is managed by a prior, who must not be related to the magistracy nor any of its ministers. He must have no interest nor concern in shipping nor in trade. He must see all the gates and doors of the apartments locked every evening by sunset; he takes the keys into his possession, and suffers them not to be opened before sunrise; and, in case of any suspicion of infection, the gates must be kept constantly locked, and opened only for necessary occurrences in presence of the prior. He must not suffer dogs, cats, &c. to lodge in the lazaretto. He must neither buy nor sell, nor suffer others to do so, within the lazaretto. No fishing boats or other small craft to come within a certain distance, or keep communication with those performing quarantine. Provisions are received by poles seven or eight feet long, and the money dipped in vinegar and salt water before it is received. The prior and his substitute must carefully avoid touching either goods or passengers in quarantine, and for this purpose they keep a cane to make those who approach them keep their proper distance; but if by an unfortunate accident they should be contaminated, they must perform quarantine. Any person maliciously touching them is liable to punishment.
Ships are strictly forbid to use any ropes but such as are tarred. Wool, silk, cotton-wool, woollen and linen clothes, and furs especially, are accounted the most dangerous goods. Animals with long hair are subject to full quarantine; but short haired ones purged by swimming ashore; feathered animals, by sprinkling with vinegar till wet.
The celebrated Dr. Mead, though an enemy to the cruel mode of abandoning the sick, or treating them with any kind of harshness, was perfectly sensible of the necessity of using every precaution for preventing pestilential contagion from being imported. In his opinion it is not sufficient that ships should perform quarantine, “the only use of this being to observe whether any die among them. For infection may be preserved so long in clothes among which it is once lodged, that as much, nay, more of it, if sickness continues in the ship, may be brought on shore than at the beginning of the forty days, unless a new quarantine be begun every time any person dies; which might not end but with the destruction of the whole ship’s crew.” He is therefore of opinion that lazarettos ought to be established on small islands near the sea-coast; and in this Mr. Howard agrees with him. The latter recommends the lazaretto at Leghorn as the best in Europe. Dr. Mead also very much insists on the utility of destroying the clothes of the sick, because, says he, they harbour the very essence of the contagion. He quotes in favour of this opinion what Boccacio says he saw at Florence in 1348; viz. that two hogs, finding in the streets the rags which had been thrown out from off a poor man dead of the disease, after snuffling upon them, and tearing them with their teeth, fell into convulsions, and died in two hours. This is one of the things which Dr. Moseley looks upon to be incredible. It is indeed very marvellous, and seems to be contradicted by M. Deidier’s account of the dog at Marseilles who swallowed with impunity the filthy pus and pestilential matter adhering to the dressings of plague sores: but, when a person of credit informs us that he saw any thing, we scarce know how to contradict him. The evidence of pestilential contagion adhering to clothes, does not depend on such accounts. That lately quoted from Dr. Canestrinus is decisive on the subject; and he informs us that one of the methods used by himself to stop the plague in Zboina, above mentioned, was, the burning of the clothes of infected persons. He says that the pestilential contagion resembles that of the small-pox, in being of a fixed nature; and that all who studiously avoided communication with the sick, or with whatever fomes might carry the contagion, escaped it altogether. “That the contagion of the plague (says he) may lie dormant for a considerable time, and be carried to a great distance by the medium of packages, &c. and again revive with its former violence, is proved by various circumstances. Chenot relates, in his treatise on the plague which raged in Transylvania, that the infection was revived a whole year after it had disappeared; and other similar instances are adduced.” If this revival happened from infected clothes or soft goods, it shows them to be dangerous in the extreme; but of this we have not any direct proof, neither indeed is such a belief quite consistent with what takes place in all plagues, viz. that the clothes of the infected are worn by the sound, without producing any reinfection. In the great plague at London, for instance, where an hundred thousand probably perished, and a much greater number must have been infected, we cannot suppose that all the clothes belonging to such an immense multitude were burned, or never made use of again. It is of necessity therefore that we suppose the pestilential contagion to become effete, and to lose its virulence, after some time; and this seems to be very much hastened by exposure to the atmosphere. The doing of this, however, by obliging people to put their naked arms into bales of suspected goods, has such an appearance of cruelty, that Dr. Mead has proposed to judge of the presence or absence of infection by allowing little birds to fly about among them; “because (says he) it has been observed, in times of the plague, that the country has been forsaken by the birds; and those kept in houses have many of them died.” But, though he says this upon very great authority, no less than that of Diemerbroeck, yet we can by no means look upon the fact to be absolutely determined. Dr. Russel indeed says that the desertion of the birds is looked upon by the Turks to be the sign of an approaching plague; but this failed in 1760. Thucydides says that birds of prey deserted the territory of Athens during the great plague in his time; and he supposes them to have been poisoned by feeding upon the bodies of such as died of the disease. It is possible that such food might be disagreeable to them, but no proof is brought of any of them having been actually poisoned by it. As for birds kept in houses, it is possible that in a time of general calamity they might have been neglected, and died for want of proper food, &c. Dr. Mead also quotes an instance which cannot be credited in a consistency with undoubted testimonies that pestilential contagion does not extend but for a very little way. Upon opening an infected bale of wool in the field near Cairo, “two Turks employed in the work were immediately killed, and some birds which happened to fly over the place dropped down dead.” Such accounts have arisen from a supposition that the whole mass of atmosphere was violently infected; but this would be totally inconsistent with the life of any human creature, and we may well put down this, as that of pestilential infection arising from cities like a cloud, as merely chimerical.[112] It is too well known that pestilential contagion, instead of soaring in the air, keeps very near the ground.
We now come to the second mode of prevention, viz. removing these local causes which, in the opinion of some, may produce a plague in any country, and, in that of others, may increase or set in action the contagion previously existing. These causes have been enumerated by the late Dr. Smith,[113] in a Dissertation on the pestilential Diseases which at different times appeared in the Athenian, Carthaginian and Roman armies, in the neighbourhood of Syracuse. They are, 1. The climate and season. 2. The situation of the armies; and, 3. Their condition. The climate of the island of Sicily in general he observes is extremely pleasant at some seasons of the year; in the neighbourhood of Syracuse particularly storms are so infrequent during the former part of the year, that the sun is never obscured for a whole day. Even in the month of January, however, the weather is warm, and as the season advances the heat becomes insupportable. In autumn it is rendered somewhat unpleasant and unhealthy by the frequent rains and chillness of the evenings. But, in particular places, during the hottest season, nothing can exceed its unhealthiness. According to Barichten, “the least stagnant water is sufficient, in the heats of summer, to poison the atmosphere: its effects on the countenances of the poor people who live in its vicinity are evident; and a stranger who travels through the island in this season ought to avoid ever passing a night near them.” De Non says, that “as soon as the sun enters the Lion, this country becomes the house of death: fevers of the most malignant kind seize on the imprudent or unfortunate wretch that spends a night near them (ponds and marshes) and few escape with life when attacked by so virulent a disorder.”
To the poisonous effluvia of these marshes the Doctor attributes, in an especial manner, the plagues which took place in the armies. In the second year of the Peloponnesian war, the Athenian army was encamped, as we are told by Thucydides, “upon marshy and unwholesome ground;” and that such kind of encampments will produce diseases in an army is well known. In the time of Dionysius, when the Carthaginian army under Imilco suffered so dreadfully, or rather was totally destroyed, his camp was situated on an eminence between two morasses, the heat at that time being excessive. Hannibal, the predecessor of Imilco, had also lost great part of his army by a plague, though he had been encamped in a healthy situation; but, in order to raise a wall which should overlook the city, he had taken the materials of the tombs found in the common burial place, the city at that time containing two hundred thousand inhabitants. “From the uncovering and disturbing of so many dead bodies (says our author) arose a terrible pestilence, which carried off immense numbers of the Carthaginians, and amongst the rest the general himself.” To the unhealthy situation of the armies also the Doctor ascribes the plague which took place in the Roman and Carthaginian camps in the time of the second punic war; and the Carthaginians suffered most, by reason of their being nearer to the marshes. The state of mind, the cleanliness of the person, &c. also must be taken into account; and our author shows that neither of these could be supposed favourable to the Carthaginians.