ABSTRACT
If the epidemic in Malta in 1813 encouraged debate as to whether or not the plague was contagious, the British Government had long been aware that traditional reliance in the efficacy of quarantine, based on the acceptance of contagion, was not universally accepted. It will have been apparent from references in this study to contemporary criticism of Richard Mead that a certain body of opinion had been denying for nearly a century that any connection existed between touching infected goods and the spreading of plague. Even in the middle of the eighteenth century, with the publication of Manningham’s The Plague no contagious Disease …, the analysis of the Marseilles crisis continued to inspire doubters and undermine the principles on which quarantine depended.1 But these anti-contagionists were not sufficiently organized and vociferous to influence either public opinion or the minds of ministers, and when Howard, and more especially Russell, adopted a contagionist stance in the 1790s, the British entered the nineteenth century with the attitude that national policy for quarantine was correct, even if plans for a lazaret were proving difficult to achieve.
