Evils of quarantine laws, and non-existence of pestilential contagion : deduced from the phaenomena of the plague of the Levant, the yellow fever of Spain, and the cholera morbus of Asia.

  • Maclean, Charles, active 1788-1824.
Date:
1824
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Evils of quarantine laws, and non-existence of pestilential contagion : deduced from the phaenomena of the plague of the Levant, the yellow fever of Spain, and the cholera morbus of Asia. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    ■JiXll PRETACE. ciples which I formerly advanced, whether re- specting the nature and cure or the cause and prevention of epidemic maladies; but more especially respecting what is not the cause of these diseases, and which non-entity absolutely forms the subject of discussion in the present volume. The demonstration will, I think, now be found complete. The politico-medical avalanches of pestilential contagion and sanitary laws, which were wont to hang over their devoted heads, being levelled with the ground, empested communities may henceforward look up to heaven, without the constant apprehension of being utterly destroyed. Disincumbered from those mortal enemies of health and life, and almost insurmountable impediments to know- ledge, the subject will revert of right to the province of the physician ; from which, by an extraordinary effect of superstition, it had been so long disjoined. The statesman, the legislator, the police, and even the municipal officer, will, in propriety, have no more to do with epidemic, than they have heretofore had with sporadic diseases. To the physician alone, untrammelled by Juntas or Boards of Health ; unapprehensive for his personal security, and freed from the re- sponsibility imposed by sanitary laws, will devolve the duties of directing, in the ordinary ,course of his profession, the means of prevention