5-7 Page Research Paper- Epidemics and the control of disease around the 1800s

75 Bull. Hist. Med., 2014, 88 : 75–101

Cargo, “Infection,” and the Logic of Quarantine in the Nineteenth Century

d av i d s. b a r n e s

Summary: In the nineteenth century, maritime quarantine officials often paid more attention to ships’ cargo than they did to the health of passengers or crew members. Based on a close reading of the everyday practice of quarantine at Philadelphia’s Lazaretto (1801–1895), this article suggests that the historical sig- nificance of quarantine has been distorted by its association with the etiological debate over contagion and with xenophobic responses to immigration. In fact, the practice of quarantine rested neither on contagionist medical doctrine nor on nativism. Rather, it was based on the danger of infection, an elusive but fundamental concept in nineteenth-century public health. The concern about cargo rather than people—and the logic of infection it reflects—bespeak a widely shared set of per- ceptions of illness and public health in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century that is not captured by discussions of contagion or of anti-immigrant bias.

Keywords: quarantine, epidemics, yellow fever, Philadelphia, contagion, infec- tion, immigration, public health

On June 26, 1804, the brig Boston sailed up the Delaware River, bound for the Port of Philadelphia from the Tuscan seaport of Leghorn (Livorno). Upon inspection at the Lazaretto quarantine station outside the city, the Boston was detained. No illness was found aboard, and there were no reports of epidemic disease in Leghorn at the time of its departure. On October 20, 1884, another vessel from Leghorn—the bark Mattea—arrived at Philadelphia’s Lazaretto. Again there were no signs of illness among

Research for this article was supported by a Weiler Faculty Research Fellowship from the School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania. I am grateful to David Baugh of the Philadelphia City Archives for his help during this research. Sara Cherico, Elena Grill, Caitleen Weaver, and especially Meghan Crnic and Katie Eichner have my effusive thanks for their tireless and resourceful research assistance. The members of Penn’s SAS/ GSE Faculty Writing Group assisted and accelerated the writing of the initial draft. I also thank Robert Aronowitz, Beth Linker, and the Bulletin’s anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

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the passengers or crew, and no reports of widespread disease at the port of origin. Again the vessel was detained at quarantine.1

The two ships sailed eighty years apart, but the reason for detention was the same: dangerous cargo—specifically, rags imported for the manu- facture of paper. Countless other mariners over the years shared the frus- tration felt by Captain Paul of the Boston and Captain Cattarinich of the Mattea, quarantined despite healthy passengers and crew coming from a healthy port. Maritime health authorities in the nineteenth century were positively preoccupied with cargo, wherever it came from. And rags were not the only merchandise to arouse concern; animal horns, cotton, and woolens often justified detention as well. Official lists of articles subject to special inspection or detention often included a dozen or more items, most of which were either (1) subject to decay, (2) permeable, or (3) of animal origin.2 Yet there were three kinds of cargo that could always be counted upon to sound the alarm at Philadelphia’s Lazaretto: coffee, hides, and rags.

Based on the everyday practice of quarantine at Philadelphia’s Laza- retto (1801–95) as reported in the minutes of the Board of Health, as well as on published accounts of quarantine policy elsewhere, this article makes two primary claims. The first is that quarantine in the nineteenth century concerned itself more with cargo than the existing historiogra- phy would lead us to believe—and at times focused even more on cargo than on arriving passengers and seamen. The second argument is that the preoccupation with cargo and the prebacteriological language of “infection” show that the institution of quarantine was not premised on the contagiousness of epidemic diseases. Rather, it was based on a loosely articulated but firmly held conviction that foul or contaminated air could be imported from overseas in vessels and goods, and under certain conditions could spark deadly disease outbreaks. After a brief historiographical overview, I outline the daily operation of quarantine at

1. Philadelphia City Archives, Minutes of the Philadelphia Board of Health (hereafter MPBH), June 27, 1804, October 21, 1884.

2. Such lists appeared routinely in local quarantine laws and regulations, and in manu- als published to assist merchants and mariners in navigating through the thicket of global commerce. For example, I. Stikeman, Steel’s Shipmaster’s Assistant and Owner’s Manual, 20th ed. (London: Longman, 1832), 304–6, and “Papers Relating to Quarantine Laws,” in House of Commons (Great Britain), Accounts and Papers, January–June 1860, 35 vols. (London: George E. Eyre & William Spottiswoode, 1860), vol. 22: Shipping. Philadelphia’s Board of Health also occasionally issued its own list of dangerous cargo. This one dates from 1817: “Cotton, Coffee, Cocoa in bags, Hides or Tallow in Hides, Rags, Turkey carpets, Camel’s hair, Turkey wool, Yarns of hair or wool, Clothing, beds, and bedding from the West Indies or Mediterranean.” MPBH, June 10, 1817.

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the Lazaretto, before examining in some detail the authorities’ concern with coffee, hides, and rags in particular. I then sketch the contours of what was meant by “infection,” based in part on what was done to remove it—that is, disinfection—before concluding with the state of sanitary sci- ence concerning cargo and quarantine nationally and internationally on the eve of the Bacteriological Revolution.

Mediterranean states regularly used maritime quarantine as a defense against plague beginning in the fourteenth century. Plague remained the chief target of quarantine until yellow fever struck European and North American ports with increasing frequency in the late eighteenth century, followed by cholera after 1831. Quarantine procedures varied from country to country and from decade to decade. Diseases differed as well; a vessel with smallpox aboard and one with yellow fever might be treated differently at the same port. Yet there is surprising continuity over the long history of maritime quarantine: isolation, ventilation, chemical disinfection, and watchful waiting were the cornerstones of quarantine practice for most of the nineteenth century, just as they had been for at least three hundred years.3 Moreover, as will be seen below, Philadelphia’s preoccupation with certain kinds of cargo was shared by officials at other U.S. and European ports as well.

The historiographical linkage of quarantine with contagion was forged more than sixty years ago. Erwin Ackerknecht’s landmark 1948 essay “Anticontagionism between 1821 and 1867” remains the obligatory point of reference for all discussions of etiology and public health policy in the nineteenth century. Ackerknecht posited a fundamental consonance between etiological doctrine and political economy in the mid-nineteenth century: contagionist explanations of epidemics and restrictive policies like quarantine appealed to political conservatives and to functionaries serving authoritarian regimes; the same notions were anathema to liberals, who rejected or soft-pedaled quarantine and promoted anticontagionism in medical and public health treatises.4 Subsequent generations of scholars have quarreled with, revised, and nuanced Ackerknecht’s thesis.5 Notably,

3. Mark Harrison, Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012), 12–49.

4. Erwin H. Ackerknecht, “Anticontagionism between 1821 and 1867,” Bull. Hist. Med. 22 (1948): 562–93.

5. Margaret Pelling, Cholera, Fever and English Medicine, 1825–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). Roger Cooter, “Anticontagionism and History’s Medical Record,” in Peter Wright and Andrew Treacher, eds., The Problem of Medical Knowledge: Examining the Social Construction of Medicine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1982), 87–108; E. A. Heaman, “The Rise and Fall of Anticontagionism in France,” Can. Bull. Med. Hist. 12 (1995):

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William Coleman, Peter Baldwin, and Mark Harrison have mentioned the concern about cargo in the quarantine debates of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.6 The daily practice of quarantine at individual ports has gone mostly unexamined, however, and Ackerknecht’s basic prem- ises—the linkage of quarantine with contagion, and the kinship between politics and etiology—remain alive and well today.7

Nativist bias is another recurring theme in the historiography of Ameri- can public health. Quarantine, it has been argued, served as one parapet in the imposing array of fortifications facing new arrivals to the United States. “In the United States,” as one historian has put it, “immigrants were  .  .  .  viewed as sources of contagion and were disproportionately affected by quarantine policies.”8 Physicians and health officials went to great lengths to depict immigrants as diseased, and to protect the native- born from contact with them. On the pretext of defense against epidem- ics, families were forcibly separated, healthy immigrants were incarcer-

3–25; Peter Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Christopher Hamlin, “Commentary: Ackerknecht and ‘Anticon- tagionism’: A Tale of Two Dichotomies,” Internat. J. Epidemiol. 38 (2009): 22–27. In the cases of yellow fever and cholera, Margaret Humphreys, Yellow Fever and the South (1992; repr., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 17–28, and Christopher Hamlin, Cholera: The Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 152–60, 173–75, provide helpful expositions of etiological debates that probe beyond the dichotomy contagionism/ anticontagionism.

6. William Coleman, Yellow Fever in the North: The Methods of Early Epidemiology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 85–107; Baldwin, Contagion and the State (n. 5); Harri- son, Contagion (n. 3), esp. 24–138. John Booker, Maritime Quarantine: The British Experience, c. 1650–1900 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), also mentions cargo, but, like most historians, implies throughout that contagion was the primary if not exclusive justification for quarantine.

7. This despite the efforts of several historians—most notably Baldwin in Contagion and the State (n. 5)—to consign Ackerknecht’s thesis to the dustbin of historiography. The view among historians that quarantine was based on contagionism predates Ackerknecht; for example, Richard H. Shryock, The Development of Modern Medicine (Philadelphia: Univer- sity of Pennsylvania Press, 1936), 82, 214. Other examples include Michael Les Benedict, “Contagion and the Constitution: Quarantine Agitation from 1859 to 1866,” J. Hist. Med. & Allied Sci. 25 (1970): 177–93; Roderick E. McGrew, Encyclopedia of Medical History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), 62–63; Howard Markel, Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 262; and Baldwin, Contagion and the State (n. 5), 4–5. Heaman, “Rise and Fall of Anticontagion- ism” (n. 5) takes issue with Ackerknecht’s chronology but echoes the linkage of quarantine with contagionism and (in large part) the politics–etiology connection.

8. Esyllt W. Jones, “‘Co-operation in All Human Endeavour’: Quarantine and Immigrant Disease Vectors in the 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic in Winnipeg,” Can. Bull. Med. Hist. 22 (2005): 57–82, quotation on 67.

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ated, and dehumanizing invective was directed against communities solely on the basis of ethnicity.9

The abundant scholarship on these campaigns accurately reflects public health policy in the great immigrant gateway cities after about 1890, but not before then. The Third Wave of immigration to the United States (1880–1920) prompted renewed xenophobia, and the Bacterio- logical Revolution intensified the perceived danger of contagion from sickly foreigners. The cholera threat of 1892 and the 1900 San Francisco plague outbreak represent the classic case studies of scapegoating and victim blaming during epidemics.10 (It should also be noted that the word “quarantine” is often used to denote a variety of policies designed to prevent sick or suspect individuals, and even entire communities, from having contact with the general population. In its original meaning, and in my usage, quarantine—the attempt to prevent disease from entering a country or other jurisdiction from the outside—differs from isolation, which aims to prevent further spread after a disease has already entered it. The difference matters in this case because what happened most often to immigrants during the turn-of-the-century epidemics was forcible isola- tion after arrival in the United States, not quarantine in the strict sense.)

Even in times of widespread nativist agitation and discrimination, such as that faced by Irish Americans after the famine migration of the late 1840s, the experience of quarantine prior to 1890 bears little resemblance to the dire scenes of persecution faced by Russian Jews in New York or by San Francisco’s Chinese community at the turn of the century.11 Passengers

9. Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace,” (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Markel, Quarantine! (n. 7); Judith Walzer Leavitt, Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public’s Health (Boston: Beacon, 1996); Susan Craddock, City of Plagues: Disease, Poverty, and Deviance in San Francisco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Marilyn Chase, The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco (New York: Random House, 2003); Guenter B. Risse, Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). See also Edward T. Morman, “Guarding Against Alien Impurities: The Philadelphia Lazaretto, 1854–1893,” Pennsylvania Mag. Hist. Biog. 108 (1984): 131–51. Morman acknowledges that quarantine targeted vessels and cargo as well as passengers, but implies that distrust or stereotyping of foreigners shaped quarantine policy in Philadelphia throughout those years.

10. Markel, Quarantine! (n. 7); Craddock, City of Plagues (n. 9); Shah, Contagious Divides (n. 9); Chase, Barbary Plague (n. 9); Risse, Plague, Fear, and Politics (n. 9).

11. Kraut, in Silent Travelers (n. 9), does discuss immigration prior to the Third Wave, and tells the story of Ellis Island’s immediate predecessor, the Castle Garden complex of immigration facilities established in 1855 at the southern tip of Manhattan. One might infer from Kraut’s account that Castle Garden, with its “medical inspection of individual

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and crew members who were actually sick with potentially epidemic dis- eases certainly aroused concern among quarantine authorities, but not because they were German or Irish. The criteria governing quarantine decisions at the Lazaretto, which guarded the entrance to Philadelphia between 1801 and 1895, were explicit and relatively consistent. Port of departure figured prominently among them—especially when a vessel arrived from the West Indies, where yellow fever was endemic—but the ethnicity or national origin of crews and passengers did not.12

Philadelphia’s Lazaretto

In 1793, yellow fever devastated the capital of the young United States, which was also its largest city and largest seaport. In numerical terms, Philadelphia was decimated, as about five thousand of the city’s estimated population of fifty thousand died in just two months’ time, while tens of thousands more fled the city.13 In response, new health laws were passed, including stricter maritime quarantine measures, and a Board of Health was established. (It consisted of both physicians and nonphysicians, who for most of the nineteenth century were chosen by the elected councils of the city and adjoining districts.) When the late-summer scourge returned with only slightly diminished fury in 1797, 1798, and 1799, the old dread was reawakened and city leaders faced another crisis. The quarantine

arrivals,” represented the beginning of institutionalized and medicalized discrimination against immigrants. I see Castle Garden’s legacy somewhat differently, however. Its admin- istrators boasted that the institution was designed precisely to rescue immigrants from victim- ization and oppression at the hands of boarding-house runners and other predators. Castle Garden was meant to connect immigrants with the resources they needed through approved intermediaries. Medical care was one of those resources, and medical inspection at Castle Garden allowed those in greatest need to be admitted to the new hospital for immigrants on Ward’s Island or the smallpox hospital on Blackwell’s Island. Friedrich Kapp, Immigra- tion and the Commissioners of Emigration of the State of New York (New York: Nation Press, 1870). Alongside the provision of needed care, separation of the sick from the healthy was obvi- ously a central goal of the medical inspection. Neither Kapp nor Kraut indicates whether any kind of coercion was involved in the referral of patients to hospitals, nor how patients themselves felt about their treatment.

12. Place of origin mattered for cargo, and port of origin mattered for vessels, crews, and passengers, because of the danger of imported infection. Yellow fever was known to be endemic to the West Indies, and West Indian cargo and vessels and crews from West Indian ports were subject to extra scrutiny for that reason. When cholera was known to be present in certain European countries or port cities, passengers and cargo from those places were similarly scrutinized. The chief criterion was immediate provenance rather than ethnicity.

13. The classic account is J. H. Powell, Bring Out Your Dead: The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793 (1949; repr., Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993).

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system was clearly broken. The fix? A new, spacious, state-of-the art quar- antine station and hospital on Tinicum Island, twelve miles southwest of the city and six and a half miles downriver from the old Marine Hospital quarantine ground. Construction of the Lazaretto campus began in late 1799, and the new station opened for business in the spring of 1801.

During the warm-weather months, all ships coming up the Delaware River toward the Port of Philadelphia were required by law to stop for inspection at the Lazaretto. The Lazaretto Physician (hereafter LP) and Quarantine Master (QM) boarded each vessel and questioned the captain at length: What was your port of departure? When did you leave? What was the state of health of that port at that time? How many passengers and crew members were on board? Were there any illnesses during the voyage? Any deaths? What were the symptoms? What was in the cargo, and from where? And more. Passengers and crew were mustered on deck and visually assessed by the LP for signs of serious illness. The QM care- fully inspected the baggage and cargo, the hull and compartments of the vessel, and the bilgewater.

Reassuring answers to all questions, healthy passengers and crew, and a cargo and vessel in good condition earned a permit to proceed upriver to the Port of Philadelphia. Any suspicious sign or irregularity was grounds for detention, until the Board of Health pronounced its verdict. Sick pas- sengers and crew members were landed and admitted to the Lazaretto hospital. The LP wrote the board at least once a day (mail went back and forth to the city twice a day) reporting on all new arrivals, all detained vessels, and all patients under treatment. He acted as the chief officer onsite, but the board had final authority on all quarantine matters, and its decisions were reported back by return mail after its daily meetings.

The stakes were high. Quarantine decisions affected lives and for- tunes; their ramifications ranged from inconvenience and boredom to severe financial loss to the spread of illness and death. And there was no dichotomy in quarantine: each vessel arrived with health, safety, and dan- ger on board in many possible permutations. Sound vessel, sound cargo, sick passenger—but the illness may be harmless; healthy passengers and crew, sound vessel, rotting cargo; filthy vessel and cargo, healthy passen- gers and crew; everybody and everything healthy and sound, but reports of widespread illness at the port of departure.

These decisions required wisdom, experience, and careful discern- ment. Often cargo was unloaded so that both it and the vessel could be ventilated and disinfected—“cleansed and purified,” in the formulaic language of the LP and the Board of Health. The vessel, cargo, and pas- sengers could be detained for periods ranging from a day to two weeks;

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in some cases, quarantine lasted a month or more, or until the end of quarantine season (usually October 1, as epidemics generally struck dur- ing the warm-weather months). Cargo could be sent on to the city while the vessel and passengers were detained; the passengers could proceed to the city in lighters or by road while the cargo and vessel were detained; and virtually any other disposition could be ordered by the board after receiving the LP’s daily updates. Not surprisingly, merchants and others continually beseeched the board to release cargo, to permit vessels to return to sea without approaching the city, or to release passengers or allow communication with them.

The prominent physicians and civic leaders who composed the Board of Health were chosen by Philadelphia’s city councils, whereas the LP was appointed by the governor of Pennsylvania. (Twenty of the twenty- eight LPs were University of Pennsylvania medical graduates; two served in Congress, and all were political allies of the appointing governor, but otherwise they were not especially prominent within the medical profes- sion.) Conflict within the board, and between the board and the LP, was not uncommon, but the need for all to appear competent and vigilant in the eyes of the public kept most disputes under control.

Coffee, Hides, and Rags

Amid this thicket of potential health hazards and heavily freighted deci- sions, through contentious epidemic years and calm years with relatively little illness, the most common item of discussion and anxiety in the LP’s reports and the board’s deliberations was cargo.14 And while rags fre- quently drew the attention of city health authorities, public enemies num- bers one and two among goods shipped to Philadelphia in the first half of the nineteenth century were coffee and hides. Probing the preoccupation with these common articles of trade helps elucidate the often hidden guid- ing principles of quarantine before the germ theory of disease.

Coffee and hides—what two commodities could be more different? The aroma of roasted coffee is as rich and alluring as the stench of decompos- ing animal flesh is repulsive. The nineteenth-century tannery was dirty and rough, whereas the coffee house was urbane and cultivated. Yet quarantine officials spoke of the two items in similar terms, and often treated them alike. Their kinship lay in the one thing raw coffee beans and incompletely treated animal hides were both liable to do: rot.

14. As seen through the filter of the Board of Health Minutes. With very few exceptions, the original LP letters to the board do not survive. The Board of Health Minutes survive in an almost uninterrupted series since 1794.

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Benjamin Rush and others indicted coffee as early as 1793. That epi- demic, Rush claimed, originated in a shipment of “damaged” coffee that had been dumped on the Arch Street wharf, and “had putrefied there to the great annoyance of the whole neighborhood.” Other eminent medical men blamed the outbreak on the arrival of a ship bearing refu- gees from the revolution in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), but Rush insisted on a local origin. The first apparent cases of what Rush called “the bilious remitting yellow fever” occurred in the vicinity of the Arch Street wharf, and “had been exposed to the exhalations of the coffee for several days.”15 One of the earliest victims, Mrs. Bradford, had spent an afternoon in a house directly opposite the wharf, and had been “much incommoded” by the “noxious effluvia” a few days before her illness began. Mrs. Bradford’s sister also fell sick after visiting her, and subsequently “perfectly recollected perceiving a peculiar smell unlike to any thing she had been accustomed to in a sick room.” Other victims also reported being sickened by the smell of the rotting coffee. Rush’s investi- gation of the neighborhood’s sanitary condition immediately prior to the appearance of the first cases revealed an additional curious detail: not only was the “extremely offensive” coffee exposed on the wharves near Arch Street, but also “some putrid hides.”16 As early as 1793, then, coffee and hides were perceived (at least by one very prominent observer) either as uniquely disgusting or uniquely pathogenic, or both.

During the yellow fever epidemic of 1798, two Philadelphians com- plained to the Board of Health about coffee unloaded from the brig Mary, recently arrived from the port of Jérémie in Saint-Domingue. Stored in a dockside warehouse, the coffee “appear[ed] to be in a very putrid state, and extremely offensive.” An adjacent store contained “a quantity of hides in a putrid and offensive state”; its occupant had very recently died of a fever “which has excited great alarm in that neighborhood,” and his daughter was said to be ill with similar symptoms. The board immediately ordered the disinfection of the premises, the return of the coffee and hides to the Mary, and the return of the vessel to the quarantine station.17

15. A cargo insurance company today describes the odor of rotting green coffee beans as “musty,” “rotten,” “rancid,” and “repellent.” http://www.tis-gdv.de/tis_e/ware/genuss/ kaffee/kaffee.htm.

16. Benjamin Rush, An Account of the Bilious Remitting Yellow Fever, as It Appeared in the City of Philadelphia in the Year 1793 (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1794), 12–13, 20.

17. MPBH, August 3 and 6, 1798. At the time, the quarantine was located at the old Lazaretto or Marine Hospital on Province Island, at the confluence of the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers.

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The focus on coffee and hides continued into the era of renewed vigi- lance marked by the opening of the new Lazaretto in 1801. “Landed,” “cleansed and purified,” “permitted up”—the words and phrases almost take on the quality of a ritual incantation, so often do they recur in the LP’s reports and in the board’s deliberations. Routine practice for ves- sels arriving with coffee or hides required those goods to be “landed” (taken from the vessel to the U.S. Customs warehouse adjacent to the Lazaretto), the vessel with the remaining cargo to be “cleansed and puri- fied” (washed down; thoroughly ventilated; disinfected with whitewash or fumigation; and bilgewater flushed), then “permitted up” (allowed to proceed to the city).

“Detained on account of her hides,” read the laconic newspaper report after the ship Louisa arrived at the newly opened Lazaretto in 1801 from Rio de la Plata in South America.18 This became as close to a blanket quarantine policy as Philadelphia had. The board periodically codified its anathema in resolutions, as in 1803: all hides arriving from outside the United States were to be landed at the Lazaretto, and “the damaged separated from the sound”; after being thoroughly ventilated, undamaged hides could be allowed into the city only if they were immediately put into tan vats, and not stored; otherwise they were to be “transported into the country.”19 By 1804 it was standard practice to land all hides and coffee at the Lazaretto until they were deemed safe, but the lowest grade of cof- fee—the “bad broken berries” called “triage”—was too dangerous for even this tough standard, “it being the determination of the Board not to suffer on any occasion the introduction of that article” into the city.20 Over the ensuing decades, the board repeatedly reiterated its refusal to allow up vessels with coffee or hides until those goods were “carefully inspected.”21

Occasionally, coffee was allowed up to the city immediately if it passed inspection; more often, it had to be ventilated for a time. The brig Venus carried both coffee and hides along with its passengers from Saint Thomas in 1803. The hides were ordered landed at the Lazaretto, but if the cof- fee was found to be “undamaged,” the vessel and passengers would be permitted up after the baggage of passengers and crew was cleansed and purified. The same story repeated itself with the schooner Morgiana, also from Saint Thomas, in 1817: hides landed, baggage ventilated, vessel per- mitted up if coffee passed inspection. When the schooner Sally arrived at

18. Philadelphia Gazette and Daily Advertiser, July 1, 1801. 19. MPBH, May 3, 17, 18, 19, and 24, 1803. 20. MPBH, May 7, 8, and 23, 1804; June 2 and 21, 1804; July 5, 1804; Oxford English Dic-

tionary, s.v. “triage,” n., http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/205658. 21. MPBH, June 27, 1809; July 1, 1818.

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the Lazaretto from Charleston in 1804, its passengers proceeded to the city right away. “If perfectly sound,” its coffee would be allowed up after thirty days had elapsed since its entry into the United States.22

Hides were very rarely in the clear, however—even when they were inspected and judged sound. An 1821 state law required anyone bring- ing hides to the Port of Philadelphia to apply (and pay) for a permit to unload them. The law applied to fish and vegetables as well, but those articles (not regularly imported from abroad, and certainly not from the endemic zone of yellow fever in the years before artificial refrigeration) were very rarely mentioned in quarantine deliberations.23

Such restrictions did nothing to diminish demand for coffee and animal hides in Philadelphia, and refinements of the board’s general policy were required in order to alleviate concerns about their safety. By 1809, as tanneries proliferated on the outskirts of the original city limits (Vine Street to the north, Cedar or South Street to the south) and as Philadelphia’s population expanded into those adjoining districts, the board allowed hides to be landed only north of Cohockshink Creek in Kensington or south of the North Yards in Southwark. In 1852, the schooner Hero was permitted to land its hides (which were found to be “in bad condition”) only north or south of the adjoining incorporated districts entirely.24

Keeping untreated animal skins away from the population was para- mount. When putrid hides were found being landed from the Helen Mar on the Lombard Street Wharf shortly before the opening of the quar- antine season in 1839, they were ordered removed. A few days later, the Health Officer reported that he had found the ship and its hides in Kens- ington, where in preparation for cleaning the vessel, “a great many men were at work on the Wharf, drying, beating, and hauling away the hides.” The board ordered them immediately removed “to some proper place more remote from the thickly settled parts of the incorporated Districts.”25

In time of epidemic, hides already inside the city became freighted with danger. When yellow fever struck Philadelphia in 1820, the Board of Health fenced off two “infected districts” near Race Street Wharf and near Walnut Street Wharf, asked residents to leave, and forbade all access to the areas. Merchants besieged the board with requests to remove goods in storage from their riverside warehouses. When the outbreak waned in

22. MPBH, May 19, 1803; June 2, 1804; May 2, 1817. 23. Rules to Be Observed by Masters and Pilots of Vessels Arriving at the Port of Philadelphia

(Philadelphia: Jacob Frick, 1821), 10–11. 24. MPBH, August 5, 1809; August 9, 1852. 25. MPBH, May 6, 8, 10, and 15, 1839.

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September, the board began to grant some of these requests. But when the firm of Maris & Evans asked permission to remove twelve hogsheads of molasses, nine pipes of wine, and one hundred dry horsehides, their request was granted—except for the hides. That same day, the board allowed the cargoes of all four vessels arriving at the Lazaretto to be brought up to the city—except for the hides.26

Why such alarm over hides and coffee? One is an animal product, the other the seed of a plant. They were among the most commonly imported items from the Caribbean Basin—the yellow fever zone—but that can’t explain the quarantine authorities’ fixation. Sugar, molasses, and other goods from the West Indies were routinely permitted up without a sec- ond glance. The key to understanding the anxiety about cargo, and by extension the practice of quarantine in the nineteenth century, is to rec- ognize the specific traits of the goods in question, and to infer knowledge from practice. The ways in which the LP, the QM, and the members of the Board of Health described the dangerous coffee and hides, and the specific measures they took to prevent them from causing disease, reveal the nature of the perceived danger.

“Damaged,” “sound,” “sweet”: the words most often used to denote dangerous or safe cargo ring strange a century later. Their nineteenth- century usage (as illustrated in the Oxford English Dictionary) points to wetness, decay, and foul odor as the foundational elements of the quar- antine concern. “Damaged” was used, among other things, to denote “merchandise that has deteriorated in quality through . . . exposure to the elements.” “Sound” meant, among other things, “free from . . . decay,” while “sweet” indicated something that was “free from offensive or dis- agreeable taste or smell” or “not corrupt, putrid, sour, or stale.” Hence, a Mr. Lynch’s request to bring up a cargo of hides from the Lazaretto in 1803 was granted “in consideration of the sound and sweet state” of the hides. Presumably, having been thoroughly ventilated, they were dry and smelled, if not pleasant, inoffensive. Similarly, in 1804, the brig Eliza and the schooner Betsy were permitted up “after having their bilge water pumped out and being otherwise sweetened.”27

Several clues suggest that the wetness or dryness of coffee and hides often determined their fate. The board ordered the schooner Olive Branch unloaded and “thoroughly purified” in 1803 because it had sunk with

26. MPBH, September 11, 1820. 27. Oxford English Dictionary, s.vv. “damaged,” adj., b, http://www.oed.com/view/

Entry/47009; “sound,” adj., I.3.a, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/185128; and “sweet,” adj. A.3.a, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/195665; MPBH, May 24, 1803 and May 12, 1804.

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coffee on board at Cape François (today Cap-Haïtien, Haiti). When the LP reported that he had landed “200 salted hides in a wet state” from the sloop Mary in 1831, the board ordered them to be dried under the inspection of the QM before any further action was taken. When hides were blown overboard from a vessel at the Lazaretto in 1838, the station’s bargemen were instructed to help in their recovery, with the hides to be stored until October 1, the end of quarantine season.28 In many cases, “damaged” may have been a synonym for wet, and “sound” for dry.

Wetness, of course, led to rot. The battle against rot is the essence of tanning, the process by which animal skins are turned into leather. Tan- ning requires fresh hides and tannin, a substance extracted from certain barks, woods, and nuts. American demand for hides in the nineteenth century far exceeded the supply of domestic animals, and most hides were imported—untreated, or at most salted—from the Caribbean Basin and South America. Moisture and warmth promoted putrefaction, as with any organic matter, and sailing ships plying the Caribbean trade in the nine- teenth century were nothing if not wet and warm. “Stagnant air, dampness, darkness, and warmth are frequently the inseparable conditions of the holds of vessels in warm climates,” wrote one American physician, who warned that in these conditions, hides and other cargo “peculiarly liable to infection” could spread yellow fever.29

Coffee too suffered from putrefaction. Beans were shipped raw, and moisture could begin the process of decay. Importers dreaded receiv- ing coffee “damaged on the voyage of importation by dampness,” which became musty, “its delicate flavor . . . much injured.” A portion of nearly every shipment suffered such damage, and even after drying and polish- ing, when it reached market it fetched a lower price than did “sound coffee.”30 The fact that both coffee merchants and health authorities used the adjectives “damaged” and “sound” in these contexts hints at the implicit etiology that underlay the anxiety about cargo: susceptible articles + dampness + warmth = decay à infection. (Of course, any organic matter will rot under certain conditions. Coffee, however, was more commonly

28. MPBH, July 11, 1803; July 6, 1831; and September 21, 1838. 29. A. N. Bell, “On the Cause, Malignancy, and Persistence of Yellow Fever Aboard Ship

(1864),” Trans. Epidemiol. Soc. London 2 (1867): 225; John Gamgee, Yellow Fever: A Nautical Disease (New York: Appleton, 1879), 27. On hides, putrefaction, and tanning in the nine- teenth century, see “Leather and the Process of Tanning,” The Working Man’s Friend, and Family Instructor 3 (1852): 134–35, and Thomas P. Kettell, “Leather,” in Charles L. Flint et al., One Hundred Years’ Progress of the United States (Hartford: L. Stebbins, 1871), 316–21.

30. Francis B. Thurber, Coffee: From Plantation to Cup, 6th ed. (New York: American Grocer Publishing Association, 1884), 18.

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imported to Philadelphia from abroad than most agricultural products, and it grew only in the tropics—the endemic zone of yellow fever—in addition to being readily susceptible to shipboard decay.)

Coffee, hides, and the conditions in the holds of sailing vessels were linked in another respect as well, according to nineteenth-century coffee experts: “Vessels from Central and South America often arrive with mixed cargoes of coffee and hides, in which the former has been almost ruined by absorbing the smell of the latter,” one connoisseur wrote. “The same effect is produced by the foul bilge-water of vessels.”31 In a dangerously closed environment, the key ingredients were fundamentally permeable and interpenetrable. Dampness damaged hides, hides damaged cof- fee, bilgewater damaged coffee, hides fouled the air, foul air damaged hides—it was a vicious circle of mutual pollution and decay. Seen from the viewpoint of the LP or the Board of Health in Philadelphia rather than the coffee importer, the nexus of wetness, heat, coffee, hides, and foul bilgewater in the ship’s hold threatened much more than the “deli- cate flavor” of coffee. It was a cauldron of potential disease. In similarly hot and damp conditions, human bodies were just as permeable and sus- ceptible to damage as were coffee and hides. Their soundness fell to the Board of Health to protect.

The third article most frequently detained at the Lazaretto—rags— neither came from the endemic yellow fever zone nor bore the taint of animal origin. They did, however, represent the threat of indirect contact with filthy human beings. Scraps of used and discarded cloth of various sorts, collected and bundled into bales, were shipped and sold to paper mills, where they were soaked until they began to break down, pounded to a pulp, then molded into thin sheets and dried. Mill owners, consum- ers, local health officials—nobody had any way of knowing the origin or means of collection of any given shipment of rags. Leghorn in Tuscany, for example, was an international center of the trade in rags, and served as a Mediterranean commercial crossroads for centuries. Leghorn rags might have originated as flags or tablecloths in Italian palaces, or they might have been tattered bedclothes from sickly peasant hovels or fetid urban slums as far away as Constantinople or Cairo.32

31. Ibid., 19. 32. A. J. Valente, Rag Paper Manufacture in the United States, 1801–1900 (Jefferson, N.C.:

McFarland, 2010); John Bowring, Report on the Statistics of Tuscany, Lucca, the Pontifical, and the Lombardo-Venetian States (London: W. Clowes & Sons, 1837), 21–28; Annual Report of the Supervising Surgeon-General of the Marine-Hospital Service of the United States for the Fiscal Year 1893 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1895), 2:317.

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Unlike coffee and hides, rags did not rot easily and they did not come from animals’ bodies. What they did share with those other dangerous cargoes was the quality of permeability. Cotton, wool, and linen, also per- meable, often appeared on lists of cargo that authorities in various ports considered “susceptible of infection” and that therefore were subject to special inspection or detention.33 Rags also represented contact with human bodies—the bodies of strangers, foreigners, perhaps sick people or even dead people. There was no way of knowing. Moreover, those who collected rags for sale stood on the very lowest rung of the social ladder. Filthy scavengers of society’s soiled debris, ragpickers were despised and feared by the respectable classes in many countries. The very nature of their work also linked them in the public mind with the transmission of disease.34 The fear of indirect bodily contact with strangers combined with the debased figure of the ragpicker to make rags a quintessentially contaminated and contaminating cargo.

Like coffee and hides, rags became especially dangerous when wet or “damaged.” Even rags shipped in good condition could get wet in the hold of a sailing vessel in the open sea, and thereby become dangerous. When the LP reported to the Board of Health in 1867 that one shipment of rags was “saturated with water and showed signs of mold,” the board revoked its earlier permit and ordered the rags carefully inspected. “Such as may be found to be damaged” were to be sent back to the Lazaretto immediately.35

Shipments of rags were detained in quarantine as early as the first years of the new Lazaretto in Tinicum. Joshua and Thomas Gilpin, who estab- lished the first paper mill in the United States on the Brandywine River near Wilmington, Delaware, in 1787, waited more than two weeks after the brig Boston’s rags were ordered landed in 1804 before the Philadel- phia Board of Health voted to allow them to take possession. Even then, the Gilpins took the rags only on the condition that they be transported

33. See note 2 above 34. Carl Zimring, “Dirty Work: How Hygiene and Xenophobia Marginalized the Ameri-

can Waste Trades, 1870–1930,” Environ. Hist. 9 (2004): 80–101; Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1861; repr., New York: Dover, 1968), 2:136–42; Henry Thomas Buckle, Introduction to the History of Civilization in England, rev. ed. (London: George Rout- ledge and Sons, 1904), 818–19; Alain Faure, “Classe malpropre, classe dangereuse? Quelques remarques à propos des chiffonniers parisiens aux XIXe siècle et leurs cités,” Recherches 29 (1978): 79–102; Barrie Ratcliffe, “Perception and Realities of the Urban Margin: The Rag Pickers of Paris in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Can. J. Hist./Annales canadiennes d’histoire 27 (1992): 198–233; Catherine J. Kudlick, Cholera in Post-Revolutionary Paris: A Cul- tural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 177–83.

35. MPBH, August 10, 1867.

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directly to the mill and not enter Philadelphia or “any populous town of the United States.” Two days after that vote, when the board discovered that the rags had been unloaded from the Boston only three days earlier, it ordered the entire process of “cleansing and purification” of the vessel repeated.36

Philadelphia continued to be an important paper manufacturing cen- ter throughout the century, and the industry’s demand for rags increased with its expansion between 1840 and 1860.37 The LP and the Board of Health thus found themselves confronted more and more frequently with the central dilemma of quarantine: allow the wheels of commerce to turn unimpeded and risk an epidemic, or err on the side of caution and risk disrupting the city’s growing economy? Rags nearly always tipped the bal- ance toward caution and delay.

The board periodically called the LP to account for allowing “filthy” lots of rags to come up to the port, and on at least one occasion resolved that he be required to detain all rags until October 1, the end of the quarantine season. With the volume of rag imports increasing and with the specter of cholera in Europe periodically threatening, the board confronted the problem with greater regularity. To minimize uncertainty for all parties, it resolved in 1866 to allow all vessels with rags in good condition and healthy crews to proceed directly to the city, with the rags sent back to the Lazaretto as soon as they were unloaded.38

Even though rags represented an indirect, remote kind of contact with filthy people, contagion was not the problem. Cargo was not usually excluded because it might have been handled by sick people. While the quarantine authorities were concerned about vessels arriving with sick pas- sengers or crew members, and they paid close attention to news of disease outbreaks in ports with which Philadelphia traded, they feared coffee, hides, rags, and other cargo regardless of the health of those aboard, and even when disease had not been reported at the port of departure. In many cases, as with the brig Expectation from the Venezuelan port of Laguaira in 1809, the Board of Health allowed the crew to come up to the city “when they desire[d],” even as their coffee and hides were landed and their vessel disinfected at the Lazaretto.39 On the delicate quarantine

36. MPBH, June 27, July 14, and July 16, 1804. 37. Zimring, “Dirty Work” (n. 34), 82. 38. MPBH, June 29, July 10, and July 23, 1866. 39. MPBH, June 24, 1809.

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question, contagion per se—the direct transmission of disease from per- son to person—was not the main issue; the possibility of importation was.40

“Infection” and Imported Contamination

While officials on the ground were concentrating on imported coffee, hides, and rags, physicians continued to argue in publications and pro- fessional gatherings about the possible contagiousness of diseases such as yellow fever and cholera. It was a strange debate, however, as vehement as it was one-sided. After Philadelphia’s William Currie withdrew from public life around 1815, virtually no respected medical practitioners promoted explicitly contagionist views. David Hosack of New York was known as “the American champion of contagion,”41 but he took care to distinguish between diseases invariably transmitted by direct contact (such as small- pox) and diseases like yellow fever and typhus, which could become con- tagious only when the air was fouled by environmental conditions or local contaminants.42 This position put very little distance between the localists and the importationists where public health policy was concerned: both favored keeping potentially contaminating influences from entering the city, and both believed in preventing the generation of foul air within the city through cleanliness and waste removal.

In the published medical literature on quarantine, there was an even more specific consensus where imported cargo was concerned. From the Lazaretto’s opening to the eve of the Civil War, even the most outspoken critics of quarantine advocated the careful screening of arriving goods. Foremost among the critics was Rush’s student Charles Caldwell, who served on Philadelphia’s Board of Health, held professorships at various universities, and published widely throughout the first half of the nine- teenth century on the origins and prevention of epidemics. Quarantine was Caldwell’s perennial bête noire. He called it “erroneous,” “destructive,” and a “false idol” “founded on  .  .  .  superstition and prejudice,” not to

40. The fact that importation did not necessarily imply contagion in the nineteenth cen- tury applies not only to yellow fever, but to other diseases as well. Many medical observers who did not believe in contagion (except perhaps in the case of smallpox) worried about the importation of anthrax in wool, of cholera in clothing, and of plague and other diseases in various other kinds of fomites.

41. Thomas D. Mitchell, “Notes from Lecture on Yellow Fever,” Transylvania Med. J. 12 (1839): 164–76, quotation on 170.

42. David Hosack, “Observations on the Laws of Contagion” and “Observations on the Nature and Treatment of Yellow Fever,” in Hosack, Essays on Various Subjects of Medical Science, 3 vols. (New York: J. Seymour, 1824–30), 1:253–61 and 3:419–41.

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mention “bigotry and delusion,” and urged that it be “entirely abol- ished.”43 The general sentiment was widely shared, although not always expressed so fervently. Caldwell based his critique on a denial of conta- gion, which was presumed to be the only justification for quarantine and which he believed to have been thoroughly discredited (except, as every- one acknowledged, in the cases of smallpox and syphilis). Epidemics, he insisted, originated in air fouled by filth, under certain meteorological conditions.44

But it is especially telling that Caldwell did not propose to allow ships unimpeded access to American ports after quarantine was “abolished.” “Far from it,” he protested: “In warm weather, especially, no vessel should be permitted to enter, whose foul condition or damaged cargo may aid in vitiating the atmosphere of the place, until the whole shall have under- gone a thorough cleansing.”45 In essence therefore, from the first decade of the century into the 1830s, this diehard anticontagionist and leading quarantine abolitionist advocated a system not very different from quaran- tine as practiced at the Lazaretto. Other opponents of quarantine through the 1850s made similar recommendations: treat sick people, let healthy people go, and disinfect damaged or suspect cargo.46

Nevertheless, merchants and passengers continually complained about the delays entailed by quarantine, and physicians often denounced its capricious and uneven enforcement from port to port. Beginning in 1857, a series of annual national conventions was held (at the initiative of Philadelphia’s Board of Health), with the goal of standardizing the nation’s quarantine policy. A panoply of complaints found full airing at the conventions, which were attended by prominent medical men and government officials from all of the nation’s major port cities. Quar- antine was “oppressive,” “exceedingly faulty,” “tyrannical,” “absurd,” “a commercial curse,” a “barbarity.” “This whole matter of quarantine is simply a relic of superstition and ignorance,” one delegate thundered. At these conventions and in much of the published medical literature, quarantine was perceived as ineffective, directed primarily at people, and based on contagion—notwithstanding Philadelphia’s focus on cargo

43. Charles Caldwell, An Anniversary Oration on the Subject of Quarantines (Philadelphia: Fry & Kammerer, 1807), 4–6, 8–9, 13, 26.

44. Caldwell, Thoughts on Quarantine and Other Sanitary Systems (Boston: Marsh, Capen & Lyon, 1834), quoted in Boston Med. Surg. J. 11 (1834): 277–78.

45. Ibid. The same recommendation appears in his 1807 Anniversary Oration (n. 43), 26. 46. For example, James Copland, A Dictionary of Practical Medicine (New York: Harper &

Brothers, 1848), 6:279 and David L. Huntington, Quarantine: Its Efficacy and Necessity (M.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1857).

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and its only sporadic detention of passengers and seamen. But in spite of the widespread antipathy to quarantine, only one delegate called for its complete abolition, and he was immediately disavowed by the majority. Quarantine needed to be reformed, the assembled officials agreed, but not abandoned altogether.47

There is a paradox at the heart of this consensus: quarantine was predicated on contagion; contagion was discredited; but quarantine—or at least some version of it—was necessary. In fact, unlike merchants (who protested even brief detentions of their vessels and cargo), physicians objected less to the practice than to the idea of quarantine. Centuries old and irretrievably yoked to medieval fears of contagion, quarantine functioned as a symbol of backwardness, superstition, and prejudice—the antithesis of science and enlightenment.48 However, to abandon all screen- ing of arriving vessels might leave America’s port cities vulnerable to the danger that nearly all physicians feared: what was most often referred to as “infection.”

Both critics and defenders of quarantine located the origins of disease outbreaks in damp, dark, crowded, filthy, and unventilated places. Those who believed in strictly local generation saw such conditions in densely populated urban neighborhoods, while importationists found them in shipboard cargo holds, but there was an underlying common denomina- tor: a pathogenic quality that originated or thrived in certain places under certain conditions. The contagion polemic in medical circles—could diseases like yellow fever be transmitted from person to person?—has obscured the tacit consensus about infection, which undergirded most public health activity before the Bacteriological Revolution.

The belief that rotting coffee or hides or filthy rags rather than sick people could ignite an epidemic would normally be called “anticonta- gionism” or “miasmatism,” or perhaps both. These terms are misleading, however, in the context of the quarantine debates. Anticontagionism implies dichotomous and irreconcilable opposition between two camps, and obscures the extent to which the localists (who campaigned for the removal of homegrown sources of filth) and the importationists (who in some cases advocated contingent contagionism but always worried about shipboard filth)49 agreed with one another. Miasmatism, in turn, has

47. Proceedings and Debates of the Third National Quarantine and Sanitary Convention (New York: E. Jones, 1859), 24, 29–33, 36–37, 56, 64, 315.

48. This is apparent from the frequent use of the kind of inflammatory rhetoric quoted above.

49. Pelling, Cholera, Fever and English Medicine, 1825–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Hamlin, “Commentary” (n. 5), 22–27.

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generally referred to strictly local sources of disease50—marshes, corpses, garbage, human waste—whereas many observers believed that “infection,” under certain circumstances, could be transported over great distances. Through much of the nineteenth century, health authorities in Philadel- phia and elsewhere sought to prevent both local and imported sources of foul air. Accordingly, cargo was detained at the Lazaretto if it was “capable of retaining infection” or “suspected of retaining infection,” in the view of the LP or the Board of Health, whether it was 1802 or 1892.51 Biomedicine has since appropriated the term to designate the introduc- tion of a pathogenic microbe into a body. This contemporary usage makes it difficult to grasp the more diffuse nineteenth-century meanings and resonance of “infection.”52

The word derives from the Latin inficere “to put in” (a dye bath, for example), “to stain,” or “to taint.”53 Quarantine-related usage shows traces of this ancestry, as the phrase “retaining infection” suggests. Permeability, as noted above, was one of the traits that brought special scrutiny to cer- tain imported goods. Infection could be a process or a quality; in either case, the mechanism at work was as invisible and ineffable as it was deadly. All agreed that it arose or was generated in certain local conditions. Most authorities believed that it could also be transported outside of its zone of origin, whether by wind, in bodies, or by inanimate objects. Hence the concern about vessels and cargo, and hence the unwillingness even of many committed anticontagionists to abandon quarantine. In fact, the actions of local health officials suggest that when push came to shove, getting rid of infection mattered more than determining exactly what it was or where it came from.

50. Frank M. Snowden, Naples in the Time of Cholera, 1884–1911 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 67; Dorothy Porter, Health, Civilization, and the State: A History of Public Health from Ancient to Modern Times (London: Routledge, 1999), 80.

51. Among the examples from those particular years: MPBH, December 15, 1802, and September 21, 1892.

52. It is important to note that “infection” also had other meanings and uses in nine- teenth-century medicine. My contention here is that this particular set of meanings was usually implied when the word and its variants were used in the context of quarantine and the prevention of epidemic disease. Extended discussions of the medical meanings and cultural resonance of “infection” can be found in Owsei Temkin, “An Historical Analysis of the Concept of Infection,” in Temkin, The Double Face of Janus and Other Essays in the History of Medicine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 456–71, and David S. Barnes, The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle Against Filth and Germs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 241–43.

53. Oxford English Dictionary, s.vv. “infection,” n., http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/95273; and “infect,” v., http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/95266.

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Because the experts rarely defined “infection” with any degree of speci- ficity, the surest way to discern what they meant by it is to examine what they did to counteract or neutralize it. We are left to infer knowledge from practice. Disinfection—the undoing of infection—also has a history that long predates bacteriology. Epidemics called for fires in the streets, pro- tective perfumes, and sulfur as a fumigant since the time of Hippocrates.54

At Philadelphia’s Lazaretto, “cleansing and purifying” vessels or cargo meant a combination of the following: whitewashing, spraying with a lime or carbolic acid solution, fumigation, heating in a steam chamber, ventilation, and bilge flushing. By the 1890s, each of these practices could be justified on bacteriological grounds. But for most of the nineteenth century, they were used not to kill specific microorganisms but rather to fight an indefinable enemy that was known only by its effects. Foul odors and other signs of decay often signaled its presence, but their absence was no guarantee of safety. Diffuse and invisible but deadly, infection in the prebacteriological era can ultimately be defined only as that which was neutralized or removed by whitewash, chemical solutions, fumigation, steam, ventilation, and flushing with fresh water.

In an 1848 textbook, Philadelphia physician Alfred Stillé attempted to establish a clear distinction between “contagion” and “infection”:

A cargo of rags from the Levant arrives at one of our ports, and on being dis- charged, creates disease in all the neighbourhood of the vessel; if the disease thus originating is like one which was prevalent at the place whence the cargo came, the rags are a source of contagion. If there is no such similarity, or there was no prevalent disease at the Eastern port, then the newly-arisen malady must be attributed to the filth of the cargo, which is, in that case, a source of infection.55

This distinction sheds no light on the nature of the morbid substance, principle, or quality, nor on why certain kinds of cargo are more likely to carry it. However, it does help explain why even those who were skepti- cal of contagion could be concerned about the importation of disease through cargo.

54. Bacteriologists advocating disinfection in the late nineteenth century often made reference to the long pedigree of this practice, while taking pains to emphasize its newly scientific justification and efficacy. See, for example, Samuel Rideal, Disinfection and Disin- fectants (London: Charles Griffin, 1895), 2–3.

55. Alfred Stillé, Elements of General Pathology (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1848), 101, as quoted in Temkin, “Historical Analysis” (n. 52), 464.

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Cargo and Quarantine Elsewhere

Health authorities in other American cities shared Philadelphia’s preoc- cupation with cargo to varying degrees.56 At one end of the spectrum, New Orleans had no quarantine whatsoever for most of the antebellum period, despite frequent yellow fever epidemics.57 Boston, where that dis- ease rarely ventured, enjoyed a reputation for efficient, “common sense” quarantine. There, according to the city’s health officer, “hides, skins, hair, wool, rags, carpets, feathers, etc., are landed here freely, every day in the spring, summer, and autumn—for no one is denied—without the least injury to the public health.” Even in Boston, however, “damaged” cargo was kept out of the port, and bales of rags and other textile mate- rials were opened and disinfected when vessels arrived from sickly ports or with illness aboard. Charleston and Savannah also made no special provisions for hides or rags, but also prohibited the landing of “offensive” or “damaged” goods. Baltimore likewise did not single out any article or category of articles, but detained for purification any cargo “of the nature or in the condition to generate malaria”—meaning not a specific disease entity but a category of fevers caused by contaminated air.58

New York, which surpassed Philadelphia as the nation’s busiest port in the early nineteenth century, flatly prohibited hides from entering the city between June 1 and November 1. Damaged coffee and foreign cot- ton were also excluded; domestic cotton was permitted to be landed only north of Corlear’s Hook in Lower Manhattan. Over the years, the dates and the specifically enumerated articles varied slightly, but cotton, rags, hides, and skins nearly always earned special scrutiny, detention, and/or disinfection. When Dr. Alexander Vaché, who served as the city’s health officer and quarantine physician at various times in his career, wrote the state assembly in 1845 to recommend revisions to the health laws, he took

56. The midcentury quarantine conventions and the many published guides for mari- ners to worldwide maritime laws and customs show similar general regulations on the books at the large American seaports, with variations in the list of cargo items deemed “liable to infection.” For example, Joseph Blunt, The Shipmaster’s Assistant, and Commercial Digest: Containing Information Useful to Merchants, Owners, and Masters of Ships, 2nd ed. (New York: E. & G.W. Blunt, 1837), 279–313. In New York in 1837, the following articles were subject to stricter rules than other cargo: rags, hides, skins, cotton, and “all other articles likely to imbibe or retain infection.” Ibid., 290. Of course, regulations on the books do not always reliably depict the daily practice of quarantine.

57. John Duffy, “Nineteenth Century Public Health in New York and New Orleans: A Comparison,” Louisiana Hist. 15 (1974): 325–37.

58. “Report of a Special Committee of the House of Assembly of the State of New York on the Present Quarantine Laws,” New York J. Med. 7 (1846): 221–22.

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no position on contagion but a hard line on cargo. “That cargoes and the baggage of seamen and passengers communicate infection,” he wrote, was “beyond dispute.” In support of this claim, which “few individuals acquainted with the history of the [New York] lazaretto would venture to deny,” Vaché pointed to a number of yellow fever outbreaks, including one in 1821 that was blamed by Mayor Stephen Allen on “a large quantity of merchandise, brought immediately from the holds of infected vessels, and landed in the vicinity of Rector Street.” Rather than designate the articles that should be subjected to detention and purification, Vaché chose to list the articles that were not “liable to retain infection” and could therefore be exempted, including minerals, many liquids, items with impermeable surfaces or containers, and certain foodstuffs.59

The state legislative committee that had solicited Vaché’s opinion did not share his inclination to be aggressively vigilant with respect to vessels and cargo. Commercial interests had agitated for the special committee to be convened for an overhaul of New York’s quarantine laws and regula- tions, which the final report in 1846 called “more complicated, restrictive, and onerous to commerce than those of any other city.” The committee accordingly recommended a significant loosening of the quarantine, and some of its recommendations were enacted into law that year. Yet even this ardently antiquarantine body acknowledged that cargo “in a dam- aged or putrid state” should not be allowed into the city. Under the new regulations—and even after the establishment of the Metropolitan Board of Health in 1866—sugar, cotton, “porous materials,” hides, and rags con- tinued to be subject to special scrutiny upon arrival in New York harbor.60

The situation was little different in Europe and the Mediterranean Basin: quarantine was deeply unpopular with many segments of the popu- lation and highly controversial politically, the mainstream of the medical profession rejected contagion, and most health authorities nevertheless continued to advocate inspection and disinfection of cargo. The major European powers who gathered for a series of International Sanitary Conferences beginning in 1851 found themselves unable to agree on a uniform quarantine code that would keep cholera and other epidemics at bay. Their debates followed predictable patterns, but it is noteworthy that cargo figured prominently in the delegates’ remarks and in the pro- posed resolutions.

59. Daily Advertiser (New York), July 13, 1805; The Revised Statutes of the State of New-York, 3 vols. (Albany, N.Y.: Packard and Van Benthuysen, 1829), 1:430–41; Alexander F. Vaché, Letters on Yellow Fever, Cholera and Quarantine (New York: McSpedon & Baker, 1852), 7, 29, 34.

60. “Report of a Special Committee” (n. 58), 232–33; New York Chamber of Commerce, Report of Select Committee on Quarantine (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1859), 27–30; Annual Report of the Metropolitan Board of Health, 1866 (New York: C.S. Westcott, 1867), 385.

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The first conference in Paris set as its objective the prevention of plague, yellow fever, and cholera. The seven-member committee charged with drafting proposals for plenary consideration voted unanimously to recommend that local health officials be authorized to order vessels “in a manifest condition of uncleanliness and infection” to discharge and disinfect their cargo. It called “generally accepted” the proposition that allowing merchandise from a sickly port directly into port cities could compromise public health, and it agreed that rags, hides, horsehair, and “animal parts in general” should always be subject to stricter regulation than other articles. Several delegates in plenary sessions blamed imported cotton for igniting plague epidemics, while others disputed any such role. The very idea of distinguishing between articles susceptible and nonsusceptible to infection was debated at great length; some derided the distinction as archaic, unscientific, “superstitious,” and “ridiculous.” Various proposals were made to substitute a classification of cargo based on animal, plant, or other origin, but none gained widespread support.61

In the end, the committee proposed four categories: harmless goods, those about which opinions were significantly divided, those “gener- ally considered dangerous,” and those deemed “dangerous in the first degree.” Those in the first category would be allowed into port without restriction; those in the second (cotton, hemp, and linen) would be sub- ject to quarantine only at the discretion of local authorities; those in the third category (including hides, horsehair, animal parts, wool, and silks) would be subject to quarantine and purification, even though there was little hard evidence implicating them in the spread of disease; and those in the fourth (rags, clothing, and personal effects), “with more reason,” would be similarly detained and disinfected.62

Subsequent International Sanitary Conferences dealt exclusively with cholera. Delegates to the 1866 conference in Constantinople and the 1874 conference in Vienna approved a list of articles to be disinfected from cholera-infected vessels; it included rags, hides, and other animal products.63 Of course, all of these deliberations were moot in the end, as

61. Procès-verbaux de la Conférence sanitaire internationale (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1852), sessions of September 16 and October 16 and 18, 1851.

62. Ibid., session of October 21, 1851. Technically, all of these deliberations applied only to plague, although the discussions often ranged beyond the limits of that single disease. The committee recommended less stringent measures for yellow fever, believing that travel time from the West Indies was enough to diminish the threat posed to European ports by that disease. It recommended no restrictions on cargo in the case of cholera.

63. Procès-verbaux de la conférence sanitaire internationale (Constantinople: Imprimerie cen- trale, 1866), session of September 26, 1866; Procès-verbaux de la conférence sanitaire internationale (Vienna: Imprimerie impériale et royale, 1874), 429–30.

Logic of Quarantine in the Nineteenth Century 99

no uniform, comprehensive quarantine policy ever gained the assent of all delegations. However, the debates show a persistent, widespread, and international concern with cargo among health authorities over most of the nineteenth century.

Epilogue: Immigration and Germs

The practice of quarantine at Philadelphia’s Lazaretto, along with the published evidence about other ports, shows that contaminated cargo often loomed larger than sick passengers as a perceived public health menace, and that doctrinal debates about contagion concealed a broad workaday consensus over the potential portability of infection. On the eve of the Civil War, the danger of cargo received official, national ratification.

The National Quarantine and Sanitary Conventions of the 1850s did finally produce a proposed national “Code of Marine Hygiene,” which was endorsed by delegates at the 1860 meeting. (Both the annual meetings and their proposed reforms died with the outbreak of war in 1861. The idea behind the conventions survived, however, and several key partici- pants joined forces again in 1872 to found the American Public Health Association.) The 1860 code represented the “almost unanimous” convic- tion of the assembled authorities that, in the case of yellow fever at least, “foul merchandise, clothing, and baggage” were far more likely to spread disease than “the body of the sick afflicted therewith.” It proposed that yellow fever patients—but not their belongings—“be permitted to enter a city with impunity.” Vessels, cargo, and baggage were to be “detained until thoroughly expurgated.” For all vessels, regardless of the presence of yellow fever, the code prescribed different treatments for three distinct categories of cargo: “Bedding, personal baggage and dunnage, rags, paper, paper-rags, hides, skins, feathers, hair, and all other remains of animals, woolens, and silks” would be subject to mandatory quarantine. Cotton, linen, hemp, and cattle would be detainable at the discretion of the offi- cer in charge, while all other cargo would be exempt from quarantine.64

The pattern of local practice had for the first time been codified, with the sanction of the nation’s leading health officials. War and poli- tics prevented the 1860 code from becoming the law of the land, but the document stands as a testament to the justification and purpose of quarantine as understood at the time. The code’s authors were among the leading critics of quarantine, and they echoed Charles Caldwell and

64. Proceedings and Debates of the Fourth National Quarantine and Sanitary Convention (Bos- ton: Geo. C. Rand & Avery, 1860), 171, 186–87.

100 david s. barnes

their other forerunners both in their critiques and in their insistence on cargo screening.

When cholera threatened the United States for the last time in 1892–93, attention in Philadelphia and other ports turned once again to imported rags as a potential vehicle of disease. The Lazaretto was on high alert for bales of this familiar commodity, especially coming from cholera-infected cities like Hamburg. There the resemblance to earlier decades ends, however. In the midst of the Bacteriological Revolution and surging immigration, rags signified contagion and the danger of foreign bodies. Beginning in the 1880s, microbiological laboratories redefined “infection” as the introduction of specific microbial pathogens into the body, refocused preventive efforts on those microbes, and gave the imprimatur of science to the resuscitated doctrine of contagion.65 Mean- while, an unprecedented influx of poor Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe poured into the nation’s seaports and were met with alarm, disgust, and discrimination. These parallel developments combined to change the purpose of quarantine and reorient its practice.

The imperative thenceforth was to prevent contagion—direct conta- gion via sick bodies, and indirect contagion via baggage and cargo. The body of the immigrant incarnated the threat of disease in the minds of many native-born citizens. During the 1892 cholera scare, one Philadel- phia municipal official sounded off in the press about what he saw as the Lazaretto’s deficiencies, and called for the federal government “to shut the gates against some of the filthy subjects who come to our shores.” He claimed to support immigration, “but not of persons so uncleanly in habit as numbers of the Huns, Slavs and Russians who seek entrance.”66

65. David Rosner, “‘Spanish Flu, or Whatever It Is . . .’: The Paradox of Public Health in a Time of Crisis,” Pub. Health Rep. 125, suppl. 3 (2010): 38–47; Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Leavitt, Typhoid Mary (n. 9); John Duffy, The Sanitarians: A History of American Public Health (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 193–220; Barbara Gutmann Rosen- krantz, Public Health and the State: Changing Views in Massachusetts, 1842–1936 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972); George Rosen, A History of Public Health, expanded ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); American Public Health Associa- tion and Mazÿck Porcher Ravenel, A Half Century of Public Health: Jubilee Historical Volume of the American Public Health Association, in Commemoration of the Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration of Its Foundation, New York City, November 14–18, 1921 (New York: American Public Health Association, 1921).

66. Philadelphia Inquirer, August 31, 1892. The official was John Huggard of the city’s Board of Charities and Corrections, who had been appointed to the governor’s special commission charged with investigating whether the Lazaretto should be closed and a new one built downriver, farther from the city.

Logic of Quarantine in the Nineteenth Century 101

In this new world, cargo still provoked concern. The Treasury Depart- ment regulations implementing the National Quarantine Act of 1893 included an article specifically devoted to rags, and referred repeatedly to “articles liable to convey infection.” The disinfection procedures recom- mended under the new law were the same ones used for decades, although they were prescribed in greater scientific detail.67 What was new was a focus on foreigners’ bodies as vehicles of contagion. No longer were decay, per- meability, and animal origin the attributes that marked articles as danger- ous. Henceforth, anything that evoked contact with filthy foreigners and their germs was suspect. Baggage obviously met this criterion, and so did rags. Occasional reports of smallpox outbreaks among rag sorters served as reminders of this commodity’s unsavory associations,68 and signaled a perceptual shift from rags as imbued with a general contamination to rags as conveying disease-specific germs—in other words, from the old to the new meaning of infection.

These years brought a punitive and xenophobic identification of the threat of disease with “notoriously unclean and ignorant” immigrants.69 But for much of the nineteenth century, in Philadelphia and many other seaports, vessels were as likely to owe their detention in quarantine to their cargo as to their passengers or crew. The worries of health officials determined to prevent the entry of an epidemic from overseas were domi- nated not by immigrants “uncleanly in habit,” but by damaged coffee, putrid hides, and moldy rags.

David S. Barnes is associate professor of history and sociology of science and director of the Health and Societies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) and The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Califor- nia Press, 1995). He is currently writing a history of Philadelphia’s Lazaretto quarantine station.

67. The regulations, “approved and adopted by the Board of Health of the City and Port of Philadelphia,” are reprinted in MPBH, May 20, 1893.

68. “The Disinfection of Rags,” Brit. Med. J., May 2, 1885, 907–8; “Rags and Cholera,” Boston Med. Surg. J. 128 (1893): 580–81.

69. New York Times, August 2, 1884.

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