ABSTRACT
War is the obvious cause of these disturbances in our own day; the seriousness of epidemics is constantly diminishing, so that today they can be said to represent a factor of only secondary importance compared with the effects of wars. The fear of contagion— or one might say an obsession with it— was in the past always and generally manifest among town-dwellers. The deliberations of municipal magistrates of which the texts have often come down to ones from the sixteenth century, bear ample witness to this fact. Prophylactic measures had been organized in the middle Ages by the urban authorities. It was a major preoccupation of all who had responsibility for the administration of a city to see that suspected cases were isolated and that all relations between the city and places known to be infected were broken off.
