Sketch of the operation and of some of the most striking results of quarantine in British ports since the beginning of the present century.

  • Gavin Milroy
Date:
1853
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sketch of the operation and of some of the most striking results of quarantine in British ports since the beginning of the present century. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    able. Now, from his work, it clearly appears that there was no recognised or known yellow fever in Cadiz either at the time when the man Santos was there or when he left it; and moreover, it is certain that he obtained a passport from the British Consul there, before he went on board the vessel in which he took his passage for Gibraltar. The vessel too, it seems, remained quite free from sickness. All, therefore, that can be made out is simply that a man, arriving in apparently good health, at the usual sickly season—in a year, too, characterised by remarkable atmospheric dis- temperature—went to reside in a confined and crowded house in a notoriously filthy locality of a very unwholesome garrison town, and that, within a few days subsequently, he had an attack of fever from which he recovered; also, that other cases of fever occurred immediately afterwards in the immediate neighbourhood of the said locality. It must not, moreover, be omitted to be mentioned that Sir James Fellowes had pretty strong grounds for believing that a fatal case of fever had occurred ten days before the man Santos’ arrival, in the person of a smuggler from Malaga, who (if the authenticity of the case is to be ad¬ mitted) must also have managed to have evaded the regula¬ tions of the port. Whatever view be taken, it is, at all events, quite obvious that the quarantine precautions failed in giving that security to the town which it was their object to impart. Dr. Nooth, who acted as health officer of the harbour during the temporary absence of Sir Wm. Pym, as well as many other medical practitioners in Gibraltar at the time, and of the ships of war in the bay, were of opinion that the disease was of local development, and that foreign import¬ ation had nothing to do with it. It should always be borne in mind that there was not, perhaps, a more unwholesome garrison town in the British dominions than Gibraltar was
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