that, "after the disease has spread, the number of the sick rendering it impracticable to provide adequately for them, while they are dispersed in different parts, or to remove all the other inhabitants from every infected (meaning contagioned) house, it becomes expedient to carry the sick, as early as possible, to some temporary hospital, unless their situation in life enable them to provide for themselves without risk to the public, in a manner that shall be satisfactory to the magistrates Besides the desperate nonsense of supposing riches to enable persons to prevent a contagion spreading from themselves, which would spread from the poor, as no law existed to authorise compulsion in this case, the plan recommended could not be carried into effect. The power of removing sick persons, by compulsion, from their habitations, and of immuring them in hospitals, or pest-houses, granted by the act of the 7th of Geo. I., was a measure so perfectly odious, even in idea, that it was, as has been stated, very shortly afterwards repealed. It was never in any instance acted upon in Great Britain, until it was revived, as applied to Ireland, by the act of the 58th of Geo. III., cap. 47, in the year 1818. To justify such a law, it would by no means be sufficient that pestilence should be proved to be propagated by means of a specific contagion: it would be further necessary to show, that all diseases so propagated are necessarily fatal. Previous to the passing of the law for the establishment of fever hospitals, &c. in Ireland, I explained at considerable length, to the various authorities engaged in the investigation, the mischievous nature of such an enactment, and did every thing in my power to prevent this preposterous bill from passing into a law. The event has confirmed the correctness of my reasoning. The failure was complete. In the hope that the authors of this absurd and destructive measure are now so heartily ashamed of it, that they will themselves be the first to propose its repeal, I shall at present abstain from all comment which might be superfluous upon so disagreeable a subject; merely observing, that, notwithstanding repeated, and urgent, and well-founded remonstrances on my part, this law, with respect to Ireland, like all its predecessors, was passed without any previous inquiry into the existence of the evil which it professed to remedy. Its existence was taken for granted, on an authority which, as I have elsewhere shown, was also assumed.[1] On faith alone, have these regulations of quarantine or sanitary laws, for upwards of two hundred years, been allowed, under various modifications, to rest.
We now come down to the æra, at which the validity of the
- ↑ The authority of the ancients. See my "Reasons for concluding that the doctrine of Pestilential Contagion could not have been known to the Ancients, &c." published in the London Medical Repository for February and March 1823.
