Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: British West Indian Conference on Quarantine, 1888. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.
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![of bills of health, because I want to ex- plain to members that everything that has to be printed should be in the hands of the printer as soon as possible, otherwise we shall not get the complete draft in time. I think, without going beyond that point for a moment, if we were to settle what would be the sections, or at all events the sense of the sections, with regard to bills of health and the form of the bills of health—it will be re- membered yesterday we agreed upon this as regards bills of health, that every vessel leaving a British West Indian Colony should be compelled to take a bill of health and all bills of health should be issued from the Customs only under special instructions from the Executive, and that every vessel arriving in a British West Indian Colony without a bill of health should be liable to be treated as an infected vessel for the purposes of inspection. To carry that out I have drafted this:— I For Sections 1, 4 and 5, See Minutes of the Sixth Sitting. Page 82.] 2. A clean bill of health shall be in the form contained in Schedule [ ] to this Ordinance. 3. A Clean Bill of Health shall be issued in all cases except an infectious disease exists to such an extent as would justify the Colony being declared an infected place, in which case there shall be endorsed on such Bill full particulars of the disease. Dr. GRIEVE: Before that was decided I think a proviso was put in that information be given from the different colonies to each other very fully, and if that was done we would be provided with fortnightly information as to the exist- ence of these diseases in any f onn in the Islands. We only now have telegraphing when it comes to the stage which would justify a proclamation. I would ask whether we should not make some pro- vision in regard to complete information of these infectious diseases being com- municated regularly. The PRESIDENT: That is only what each colony by its own Ordinance would compel itself to state on its own bill of health. I don't know that it has much to do with communication. Wh at I mean is, when a colony feels it is obliged to endorse its bill of health by reason of disease existing to such an extent as to justify its proclmation as an infected port, it would not merely put infectious disease prevails, but would also state the facts. Dr. ORIEVE : When disease exist« but has not reached the stage of mak- ing it liable to declare the j)lace an infected place. As it stands now the provisions of the Ordinance give no protection unless there have been 9 con- secutive cases in three weeks of yellow fever. I think myself this colony would never be satisfied to be placed in a position of not knowing what was going on in any of the other colonies until there had been 9 cases ; vessels would come in with clean bills of health and we would have no means of dealing with them at all. It is to get over that difficulty I make the suggestion. If the colonies pledge themselves to send full and true particulars every fortnight, of all these diseases in the colony, there would be no difficulty; that would be accepted in lieu of the bill of health. But the original idea was that the bill of health should contain on it an explicit statement of particulars. Dr. crane : How would it do if you had your clean bills of health divided—absolutely clean, and a clean bill annotated and endorsed ? Foul bills of health would come under the clauses where the colony was liable to be pro- claimed. The president : There was a strong objection to endorsing your bills at all, unless the disease was epidemic. It was pointed out that in some coun- tries, Spanish colonies for instance, such endorsation would make them proclaim you an infected place ; and on that some sort of compromise was arrived at—I don't know exactly how it was come to, but the question arose if we agreed to that whether there ought not to be some information passing between British West Indian colonies so as to infonn one another before it became necessary to declare it epidemic. In that case there would have to be another resolu- tion. It arises in consequence of the compromise not to endorse the bill of health until disease is epidemic. Mr. low : Perhaps the Surgeon General of Demerara would frame a resolution to that effect. Dr. PRINGLE : If we had a resolu-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21297678_0205.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
