17 



These officers were authorized to spend public money for the purpose 

 of isolating infected ships, goods, and persons at an island of the lagoon. 

 A medical man was stationed with the sick. As a later result of these 

 arrangements, the first thoroughly constituted maritime quarantine 

 station of which there is historical record was established in 1403 on 

 the island of Santa -Maria di Nazareth, at Venice. The island had pre- 

 viously belonged to the hermit monks of the order of St. Agostino. 

 The record of the foundation of the first maritime quarantine is found 

 in a Venetian manuscript written by Giovanni Tiepolo, a patrician. 

 The chronicle reads: 



1403. The pest began at Venice. A place for a lazaretto was seized from Friar 

 Gabriel, of the order of Hermits, and Santo Spirito was given to him. 



Neighboring States engaged in commerce in the Mediterranean 

 speedily followed the* example of Venice. The first maritime quar- 

 antine station at Genoa was founded in 1467, and at Marseille in 1526. 

 The Marseille quarantine, one of the most complete of its kind, occu- 

 pied the island of Pomique. This establishment had, in former times, 

 been a leper house, but, in 1476, was converted into a plague hospital, 

 and later became a maritime quarantine station. 



It was not until 1459 that a public bureau of sanitation existed in 

 the Republic of Venice. In that year officers, called conservators of 

 sanitation, were regularly appointed. . This information was handed 

 down by a contemporary seafarer, Ser Domenico Malipiero, a Vene- 

 tian patrician, an expert in commerce and diplomacy, who, in 1488, 

 commanded the men-of-war under Captain-General Ser Jacopo Mar- 

 cello at the celebrated naval battle of Gallipoli. In the contest against 

 the Ottoman fleet the captain-general was killed, and Malipiero (who 

 had a grade relative to that of vice-admiral at the present time) took 

 command and was victorious. Malipiero wrote certain annals of his 

 life which he bequeathed to his son-in-law. This interesting diary, 

 in Venetian dialect, remained secret until 1844, when it was published 

 in the Italian Historical Archives. 



The city of Barletta became at one period of the Middle Ages the 

 richest commercial port, next to Venice, in the Adriatic. This was 

 owing to certain concessions granted the city whereby the traffic of a 

 large territory was compelled to enter and leave by her gates. The 

 privilege was not without its drawbacks. Barletta underwent three 

 pestilences of a particularly aggravating character. The first, in 1384, 

 was a strange malady that caused the sufferers to lose their skins like 

 a molting snake. The other two epidemics (1498 and 1656) were 

 probably bubonic plague, and in the last 35,000 souls, almost the 

 entire population of the city, perished. These afflictions gave rise to 

 the practice at Barletta of absolutely refusing entry to any infected 

 vessel until the expiration of a long period of observation at a place 

 outside the entrance of the port. 

 21526— No. 12—03 2 



