Disease, diplomacy and international commerce: the origins of international sanitary regulation in the nineteenth century

Journal of Global History

Volumn 1, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 197-217

  Harrison, Mark ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33947139373     PISSN: 17400228     EISSN: 17400236     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S1740022806000131     Document Type: Review

References (119)

1. N. M. Goodman, International health organizations and their work, London: J. & A. Churchill, 1952, pp. 34-6;
2. Howard-Jones, The scientific background of the international sanitary conferences, Geneva: WHO, 1975, p. 11;
3. David P. Fidler, International law and infectious diseases, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999, pp. 21-37.
4. The classic statement of the relationship between ideology and sanitary policy is Erwin Ackerknecht's essay, 'Anticontagionism between 1821 and 1867', Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 22, 1948, pp. 562-93.
5. However, as Peter Baldwin has recently pointed out, the connection between politics and policy is far more complex than Ackerknecht's formulation suggests. See Peter Baldwin, Contagion and the state in Europe 1830-1930, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
6. Ann G. Carmichael, Plague and the poor in Renaissance Florence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 110-21.
7. Paul Slack, The impact of plague in Tudor and Stuart England, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985, p. 324. Those who believed that yellow fever was a contagious disease often likened it to plague, some claiming it was different from plague only in degree rather than in kind.
8. For example, Henry Warren, A treatise concerning the malignant fever in Barbados, and the neighbouring islands: with an account of the seasons there, from the year 1734 to 1738, in a letter to Dr. Mead, London: Fletcher Gyles, 1740.
9. 'Quarantaines', Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences médicales, Paris: P. Asselin & G. Masson, 1874, p. 24.
10. David Cantor, ed., Reinventing Hippocrates, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002.
11. Jean Baptiste Senac, Traité des causes des accidens, et de la cure de la peste, Paris: P-J. Mariette, 1744.
12. Arnold Zuckerman, 'Plague and contagionism in eighteenth-century England: the role of Richard Mead', Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 78, 2004, pp. 273-308.
13. Slack, Impact, pp. 330-2.
14. 'Extracts of several letters of Mordach Mackenzie, M.D. concerning the plague at Constantinople', trans. 93, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 47, 1752, pp. 384-95;
15. William Brownrigg, Considerations on the means of preventing the communication of pestilential contagion and of eradicating it in infected places, London: Lockyer Davis, 1771, p. 4.
16. Brownrigg, Considerations.
17. John Howard, An account of the principal lazarettos in Europe, Warrington: William Eyres, 1789, pp. 25-7.
18. E.g. Della peste ossia della cura per preservarsene, e guarire da questo fatalismo morbo, Venice: Leonardo & Giammaria, 1784.
19. Johann Peter Frank, A system of complete medical police, ed. E. Lesky, Baltimore: J. H. V. Press, 1976, trans. by E. Vlim from 3rd edn., Vienna, 1786, p. 446.
20. Paskal Joseph Ferro, Untersuchung der Pestanstekung, nebst zwei Aufsätzen von der Glaubwürdigkeit der meisten Pestberichte aus der Moldau und Wallachey, und der Schädlichkeit der bisherigen Contumazen von D. Lange und Fronius, Vienna: Joseph Edlen, 1787.
21. Martin Lange, Rudimenta doctrinae de peste, Vienna: Rudolph Graeffer, 1784.
22. Mark Harrison, Disease and the modern world: 1500 to the present day, Cambridge: Polity, 2004, pp. 58-68.
23. Gunther E. Rothenberg, 'The Austrian sanitary cordon and the control of bubonic plague: 1710-1871', Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 28, 1973, pp. 15-23.
24. Herbert H. Kaplan, The first partition of Poland, New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1969, pp. 129-30.
25. D. McKay and H. M. Scott, The rise of the great powers 1645-1815, London: Longman, 1983.
26. John T. Alexander, Bubonic plague in early modern Russia: public health and urban disaster, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 249-51.
27. Benjamin Rush, An account of the bilious remitting yellow fever, Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1794;
28. J. H. Powell, Bring out your dead: the great plague of yellow fever in Philadelphia in 1793, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949;
29. William Coleman, Yellow fever in the north: the methods of early epidemiology, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987;
30. Martin S. Pernick, 'Politics, parties and pestilence: epidemic yellow fever in Philadelphia and the rise of the first party system', in J. Walzer Leavitt and R. L. Numbers, eds., Sickness and health in America: readings in the history of medicine and public health, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, pp. 356-71.
31. Carla G. Pestana, The English Atlantic in an age of revolution 1640-1661, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
32. Dale Ingram, An historical account of the several plagues that have appeared in the world since the year 1346, London: R. Baldwin, 1755;
33. Richard Manningham, A discourse concerning the plague and pestilential fevers, London: Robinson, 1758.
34. John Taylor, Travels from England to India, in the year 1789, London: S. Low, 1799, vol. 1, pp. 114-5.
35. Some of the best examples are: James Lind, An essay on diseases incidental to Europeans in hot climates, London: T. Beckett & P. A. De Hondt, 1768;
36. John Clark, Observations on the diseases in long voyages to hot countries, and particularly to those which prevail in the East Indies, London: D. Wilson and G. Nicol, 1773;
37. Charles Curtis, An account of the diseases of India, Edinburgh: W. Laing, 1807.
38. For a discussion of this literature, see W. F. Bynum, 'Cullen and the study of fevers in Britain, 1760-1820', in W. F. Bynum and V. Nutton, eds., Theories of fever from antiquity to the enlightenment, Medical History supplement no. 1, London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1981;
39. Richard B. Sheridan, Doctors and slaves: a medical and demographic history of slavery in the British West Indies, 1680-1834, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985;
40. Mark Harrison, Climates and constitutions: health, race, environment and British imperialism in India 1600-1850, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.
41. John P. Wade, A paper on the prevention and treatment of the disorders of seamen and soldiers in Bengal, London: J. Murray, 1793, pp. 5, 9.
42. Gilbert Blane, Observations on the diseases incident to seamen, London: Joseph Cooper, 1785, p. 128.
43. John R. McNeill, 'The ecological basis of warfare in the Caribbean, 1700-1804', in M. Utlee, ed., Adapting to conditions: war and society in the eighteenth century, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1982;
44. David Geggus, Slavery, war, and revolution: the British occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793-1798, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982;
45. Roger N. Buckley, The British army in the West Indies: society and the military in the revolutionary age, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998.
46. P. Assalini, Observations on the disease called the plague, on the dysentery, the opthalmy of Egypt, and on the means of prevention, with some remarks on the yellow fever of Cadiz, trans. A. Neale, New York: T. J. Swords, 1806.
47. Margaret Pelling, 'The meaning of contagion: reproduction, medicine and metaphor', in A. Bashford and C. Hooker, eds., Contagion: historical and cultural studies, London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 15-38.
48. E.g. Hector M'Lean, An enquiry into the nature, and causes of the great mortality among the troops at St. Domingo, London: T. Cadell, 1797;
49. James Clark, A treatise on the yellow fever, as it appeared in the island of Dominica, in the years 1793-4-5, London: J. Murray and S. Highley, 1797;
50. J. Mabit, Essai sur les maladies de l'armée de St.-Domingue en l'an XI, et principalement sur la fièvre jaune, Paris: École de Médicine, 1804;
51. Victor Bally, Du typhus d'Amérique ou fièvre jaune, Paris: Smith, 1814.
52. See A. G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in world history, London: Pimlico, 2002;
53. C. A. Bayly, The birth of the modern world 1780-1914, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
54. Robbie Robertson, The three waves of globalization, London: Zed Books, 2003;
55. Rondo Cameron and Larry Neal, A concise economic history of the world, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
56. See 'Globalization', in Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in question: theory, knowledge, history, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
57. See for example, J. Tommasini, Recherches pathologiques sur la fièvre de Livorne de 1804, sur la fièvre jaune d' Amérique, Paris: Arthus-Bertrand, 1812.
58. WLHUM, Western MS.3883, Maj.-Gen. Sir Charles Phillips, 'Letters and instructions to the officers during the plague at Corfu, 1816'.
59. E.g. Hugh Smith, An essay on the nerves ... to which is added an essay on foreign teas, London: P. Norman, 1799;
60. Thomas Trotter, Medicina nautica: an essay on the diseases of seamen, London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1797, pp. 9-10;
61. Thomas Trotter, A view of the nervous temperament, London: Longman et al., 1807;
62. James Johnson, An essay on the morbid sensibility of the stomach and bowels, London: T. & G. Underwood, 1827.
63. James McGrigor, Medical sketches of the expedition to Egypt, from India, London: J. Murray, 1804.
64. E.g. James McCabe, Observations on the epidemic cholera of Asia and Europe, Cheltenham: G. A. Williams, 1832, pp. 1-4.
65. McCabe, Observations, pp. 5-6;
66. William White, The evils of quarantine laws, and non-existence of pestilential contagion, London: Effingham Wilson, 1837.
67. See also Pelling, Cholera, pp. 24-5;
68. Michael Durey, Return of the plague: British society and the cholera of 1831-2, London: Macmillan, 1979;
69. Harrison, Climates, chap. 4.
70. Richard Evans, 'Epidemics and revolutions: cholera in nineteenth-century Europe', in P. Slack and T. Ranger, eds., Epidemics and ideas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 167-8;
71. Richard Evans, Death in Hamburg: society and politics in the cholera years 1830-1910, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.
72. Baldwin, Contagion, pp. 97-8.
73. On the rise of anticontagionist sentiment in France see Ackerknecht, 'Anticontagionism';
74. Ann F. La Berge, Mission and method: the early nineteenth-century French public health movement, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 90-4;
75. E. A. Heaman, 'The rise and fall of anticontagionism in France', Canadian Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 12, 1995, pp. 3-25.
76. See WLHUM, Western MS.4911, A. D. Vasse St. Ouen, French consul at Larnaca, Cyprus, to A. R. Roussin, French ambassador at Constantinople, 27 November 1834 to 26 April 1836.
77. La Verne Kuhnke, Lives at risk: public health in nineteenth-century Egypt, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990;
78. Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and history: disease, power, and imperialism, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997, pp. 35-9.
79. De Ségur Dupeyron, Rapport adressé a son exc. le ministre du commerce, chargé de procéder a une enquête sur les divers régimes sanitaires de la Méditerranée, Paris: L'Imprimerie Royale, 1834.
80. C. K. Webster, Palmerston, Metternich and the European system 1830-1841, London: The British Academy, 1934, pp. 19-21.
81. John Bowring, Observations on the oriental plague, and on quarantine as a means of arresting its progress, Edinburgh: W. Tait, 1838.
82. Earl of Aberdeen, to Lord Cowley, British Ambassador to France, 27 June 1843, Correspondence respecting the quarantine laws since the correspondence last presented to parliament, London: T. R. Harrison, 1846, PP 1846 [718], 45.
83. Prince Esterhazy, Austrian ambassador to Britain, to Palmerston, 19 November 1936, Correspondence relative to the contagion of plague and the quarantine regulations of foreign countries, 1836-1943, London: T. R. Harrison, 1843, PP 1843 [475], 54.
84. Palmerston to Sir Frederick Lamb, British ambassador to Austria, 11 June 1838, ibid.
85. Harold Nicolson, The congress of Vienna: a study in allied unity 1812-1822, London: Constable and Co., 1946;
86. Henry A. Kissinger, A world restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the problems of peace 1812-22, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1957;
87. Charles Webster, The congress of Vienna 1814-1815, London: Thames and Hudson, 1963;
88. Tim Chapman, The congress of Vienna: origins, processes and results, London: Routledge, 1998.
89. These efforts were grounded on a report on quarantine in the Mediterranean by the French academy of medicine chaired by Dr R. C. Prus and published in 1846. See George Weisz, The medical mandarins: the French academy of medicine in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, New York: 1995, p. 77.
90. F. S. L. Lyons, Internationalism in Europe 1815-1914, Leyden: A. W. Sijthoff, 1963, pp. 56-64.
91. F. R. Bridge and Roger Bullen, The great powers and the European states system 1815-1914, London: Longman, 1980, pp. 41-2.
92. Palmerston to Marquess of Clanricarde, 9 July 1839, correspondence relative to the affairs of the Levant, PP 1841 [304], 8, Session 2.
93. Coleman Phillipson and Noel Buxton, The question of the Bosphorous and Dardanelles, London: Stevens and Hayes, 1917, pp. 74-80.
94. Roger Bullen, Palmerston, Guizot and the collapse of the entente cordial, London: The Athlone Press, 1974, p. 334.
95. Gavin Milroy, Quarantine and the plague: being a summary of the report on these subjects recently addressed to the royal academy of medicine in France, London: Samuel Highley, 1846, p. 5.
96. Donald Quataert, 'Population', in H. Inalcik and D. Quataert, eds., An economic and social history of the Ottoman empire, vol. 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 787-9.
97. Donald Quataert, The Ottoman empire: 1700-1922, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 127-8.
98. The regulations were approved in May 1841 and were accompanied by detailed guidelines for all doctors in the sanitary service of the Ottoman empire. See Papers respecting quarantine in the Mediterranean, London: Harrison & Sons, 1860, pp. 81-7.
99. Metternich to Baron Langsdorff, French chargé d'affaires at Vienna, 13 July 1838, PP 1843 [475], 54.
100. The council consisted of sixteen members, with an Ottoman official as president; around half were sent by foreign powers, principally Britain, France and Austria-Hungary. See Papers respecting quarantine, p. 94.
101. Webster, Palmerston, p. 24.
102. Aberdeen to Lord Cowley, 27 June 1843, PP 1846 [318], 45.
103. Metternich to Sir Robert Gordon, British ambassador to Austria, 24 May 1844; Gordon to Aberdeen, 31 May 1844; Canning to M. Lefevre, 17 April 1845; Canning to Lefevre, 12 September 1845, PP 1846 [718], 45.
104. Pym to the Earl of Dalhousie, 5 June 1845; Pym to Lefevre, 6 June 1845, PP 1846 [718], 45.
105. Pym to Lefevre, 22 September 1845, PP 1846 [718], 45.
106. See tables of vessels subjected to quarantine at Rhodes, Papers respecting quarantine, pp. 66-70.
107. General Board of Health, Report on quarantine, London: W. Clowes & Sons, 1849, pp. 78-9.
108. Magenis to Aberdeen, 15 November 1845, PP 1846 [718], 45.
109. E.g. Arthur T. Holroyd, The quarantine laws, their abuses and inconsistencies, London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1839.
110. Hansard, Parl. debates, 15 March 1842, cols. 608-18.
111. Procés-verbaux de la conférence sanitaire internationale, ouverte à Paris le 27 Juillet 1851, vol. 1, 5 August 1851, pp. 3-4.
112. Bullen, Palmerston, pp. 337-8.
113. A. J. P. Taylor, The struggle for mastery in Europe 1848-1918, Oxford: Clarendon, 1954, p. 46.
114. Howard-Jones, Scientific background, pp. 15-16.
115. Conférence sanitaire internationale, 24 October 1851, pp. 23-25; 4 October 1851, pp. 8-9; 18 September 1851, pp. 3-12.
116. Conférence sanitaire internationale, vol. 2, Annex to Proc. 29, 11 November 1851.
117. Fidler, International law, chap. 2.
118. Mark Harrison, Public health in British India: Anglo-Indian preventive medicine 1859-1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, chap. 5.
119. E.g. Amir A. Afkhami, 'Defending the guarded domain: epidemics and the emergence of an international sanitary policy in Iran', Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 19, 1999, pp. 122-34.