ABSTRACT
The rise of political and economic nationalism has seriously limited the individual's freedom to travel and study abroad, and the increasing responsibilities for health services undertaken by governments cannot be without effect on the fruitfulness of unofficial international relations in medicine. In any complete account of international health work reference would have to be made to the International Red Cross Organization, the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, and the various international medical congresses. The first intergovernmental health measures depended upon the theory of the contagiousness of certain diseases, and originated with precautions, often excessive, designed to restrict the importation of such diseases from one country into another. Although the segregation of lepers had long been common, maritime quarantine measures were first instituted when the pandemic of bubonic plague—the Black Death—devastated Europe in the fourteenth century. The official British standpoint was unswervingly miasmatist and anti-quarantine.
