QUARANTINE. Quarantine regulations are regulations chiefly of a restrictive nature, for the purpose of preventing the communication from one country to another of contagious diseases, by means of men, animals, goods, or letters. The origin of the tarn quarantine (which originally signified a period of forty days during which a person was subject to the regulations in question) is explained in the article) LAZARETTO. The period of forty days during which a widow entitled to dower can remain in her husband's mansion-house after his death is also called, in our law, the widow's quarantine. (Blackstone's Com mentaries,' vol. ii.) Quarantine regulations consist in the interruption of intercourse with the country in which a contagious disease is supposed to prevail, and its the employment of certain precautionary measures respecting men, animals, goods, and letters coining from or otherwise communi cating with it. Men and animals are subjected to a probationary con finement, and goods and letters to a process of depuration, in order to ascertain that the contagious poison is not latent in the former; and to expel it, if it be present, in the latter. Quarantine regulations respecting men and animals are therefore founded on the assumption that the contagious poison, after having been taken into the constitution of a man or an animal, may remain dormant in it for a certain time, and that a seclusion of a certain duration is necessary, in order to allow the disease time to show itself, or to afford a certainty that the disease is not therm Quarantine regulations respecting gouda and letters are founded on the assumption that the contagious poison may be contained in goods and letters, and transmitted from them so as to communicate tile disease to men.
The country from which the introduction of a contagious disease is apprehended, may either be conterminous with the country which establishes the quarantine regulations, or may be divided from it by tile sea. Accordingly quarantine lines may either be drawn round a coast, as is the cane in France, Italy, and Greece, with respect to the Levant ; or they may be drawn along a land frontier, as on the frontier between Austria and Servia and Wallachia.
The contagious diseases which quarantine regulations are intended to guard against are plague and yellow-fever, and latterly cholera. We arc not aware whether small-pox has ever been made a snbjeet of quarantine regulations ; but this question is now of no practical moment, since vaccination has supplied a preventive of small-pox far more efficacious than any quarantine regulations could be.
The most important disease, with reference to quarantine regulations, is the plague of the Levant ; and in practice, quarantine regulations are of little importance except with respect to the intercourse by land and sea with Turkey, Asia Minor, and Egypt, and some other of the Mohammedan countries bordering on the Mediterranean.
In the article PESTILENCE there is an explanation of the nature of the disease styled plague, which, although formerly prevalent over the whole of Europe, is now nearly confined to the Levant ; and it is there stated that its symptoms, morbid changes, history, and mode of propa gation, bear so close a resemblance to those of the malignant typhus of this country, that it is difficult to regard them otherwise than as different types of the same disease. It is also shown in the same article that the plague of the Levant appears to be generated by the same causes which generate typhus in this country, namely, filthy, crowded, and ill-ventilated dwellings, want of personal cleanliness, defective drainage, and insufficient or unwholesome food (Report of Dr. Arnett and Dr. Kay, in the Appendix to the Fourth Annual Report of the Poor-Law Commissioners; p. 103), and that when the disease has been thus generated, it may, particularly under the influence of any of the causes which originally produced it, be communicated from one person to another. It appears likewise that its communication from one person to another is promoted not only by filth, want of ventilation, and the other usual accompaniments of squalid poverty, but also by certain atmospheric causes, such as a certain state of heat, moisture, ke., respecting which we are as yet imperfectly informed. The plague, therefore, is both epidemic and contagious ; that is to say, it may either be generated by local causes, which simultaneously affect a large number of the inhabitants of a country, or it may be communicated directly from one person to another. Where a disease is both epidemic and contagious, it is difficult to determine what proportion of the cases of it are due to local causes and what proportion to contagion. The
analogy of typhus in this country would lead us to believe that the number of cases of plague in the plague countries produced by contagion is small as compared with the number produced by local causes. The invisible nature of the ordinary causes of plague and other epidemic diseases, and the simultaneous seizure of many persons in the same district, the same street, or the same house, have naturally led to the belief that the disease is in every case communicated from one person to another ; according to the fallacy ingeniously exposed by Dr. Radcliffe, who, on being asked his opinion respecting the contagiousness of epidemic diseases, answered : " If you and I are exposed to the rain, we shall both get wet; but it does not follow that we shall wet one another." This view of the ordinary causes of plague is likewise confirmed by the undoubted fact which is adverted to in the article PESTILENCE, that the poor are tho chief sufferers by it, and that it prevails most in the filthiest and worst quarters of towns. Dr. Patrick Russell, in writing of the plague at Aleppo in 1762, makes the following remarks : —" The villages appeared to suffer in a singular degree, owing perhaps to the structure of the huts and cottages, which are small, with few or no windows, and stand crowded together. In this they resemble the Keisarias within the city, which are inhabited by the lower class of people, and in which the contagion spreads also with great fury. The inhabitants of the city of the same class, but who live in districts where the houses are less connected, suffered more than the middling class possessing more airy habitations, but less than the Keisarias. The people of rank, or in higher offices, notwithstanding the promiscuous crowds frelaenting their palaces, suffered least of alL Neither the governors of the city, the cacti, nor the nakeeb, and very few of the agar of superior rank, were themselves infected, though the plague had penetrated into most of their harems, and many of the pages and other attendants without doors were carried off by it. In these great harems, however, the contagion seldom spreads much; of perhaps about forty females, not more than four or five being infected. . . . Of all people, the Jews appear to have the strongest dread of the plague, a circumstance in one light rather fortunate, no place being more favourable to its propagation than the habitations of the lower class of that nation. The houses arc small, or, if large, the different apartments are crowded with different families. Many of the houses are more than a story below the level of the street, in a condition half ruinous, dirty in the extreme, damp, and badly aired, from the nature of the situation : and the wretched inhabitants are clothed in raga. When one of them is taken ill, and known to have the plague, he is immedi ately abandoned to the care of an attendant, and the rest of the family seek refuge, if possible, at some distance. The families lodged in the other apartments, all not having it in their power to fly, are obliged to remain, but avoid approaching the chamber of the sick, and restrain their children from going into the court-yard. Thus pent up, they suffer all the inconveniences of the hot season in the midst of perpetual dread, till at length, what often happens, they also aro attacked with the distemper. It was not without horror I descended into these dreary mansions." (Russell's Historical Journal of the Plague,' pp. 61-64.) From the fact of the plague prevailing principally among the poor, and rarely attacking the rich, it may be inferred either that the plague is produced exclusively by the filth, crowding, and bad food to which the poor are subject ; or that, if it be contagious, the contagion does not in general take effect upon the inhabitants of spacious and cleanly houses, who are clean in their persons, orderly in their habits, and have a sufficient supply of wholesome food. We see that diseases which appear to be contagious under nearly all circumstances prevail equally among the rich and poor, and that none of the physical advantages possessed by the rich afford any security against it. Thus, before the introduction of vaccination, small-pox was equally destructive to persons of all ranks in society; and the contagious diseases which attack children, as measles and hooping-eough, make no distinction between the children of the rich and the poor.