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not begin to enter the Mediterranean until the time of the Crusades, 

 were usually, in early years when engaged in the Levantine trade and 

 from infected ports, sent to Mediterranean quarantines for treatment. 

 In 1710, under the reign of Queen Anne, a rigorous quarantine act 

 was passed in England, and in 1721 two ships with cargoes of cotton 

 goods from Cyprus, where plague prevailed, were burned by the san- 

 itary authorities in English waters. A quarantine station was estab 7 

 lished in 1741 in Stangate Creek, on the Medway. Here vessels, not 

 treated at Mediterranean quarantines, were submitted to practically 

 the same procedures as were in vogue at French and Italian ports. 

 Floating hulks were also used as quarantine stations in England from 

 about the middle of the eighteenth century. The act of Queen Anne's 

 reign was qualified by later enactments, and during the pest in Poland, 

 in 1780, vessels bound for England from the Baltic were compelled to 

 undergo a typical old-fashioned quarantine. A few years later there 

 was an order in effect directing all vessels on the way to England and 

 liable to quarantine to show a yellow flag at the mainmast head when 

 in sight of other vessels at sea during the day and a distinctive light 

 at night. From the beginning of the nineteenth century quarantine 

 restrictions were, by changes in the laws and their application, materi- 

 ally relaxed in Great Britain, and as a substitute for former practice 

 it has not been the custom in modern times to detain any vessel unless 

 there has been communicable disease aboard during the voyage, or 

 such exists on arrival. Following the decision of the Spanish Govern- 

 ment in 1821, that yellow fever was to be considered quarantinable, 

 an inquiry on the subject was made in England in 1823 and 1824, 

 which resulted in the passage of a law directing the same procedures 

 to be applied against yellow fever as against plague. 



In France, until the year 1821, vessels from the Levant were not 

 allowed to enter at any ports except Marseille and Toulon. The 

 sanitary regulations of these ports were fortified by royal edicts. 

 With the appearance of yellow fever on the frontier of Catalonia in 

 1821, an appalling epidemic that spread from Barcelona and killed 

 25,000 people in five months, a law was passed by the French Cham- 

 bers, March 5, 1822, making a uniform sanitary code for all France, 

 which, with certain subsequent modifications, formed the basis of 

 French maritime sanitary practice. 



Quarantine in the different continental European maritime countries 

 during the eighteenth century was practically on a uniform basis, and 

 during the first half of the succeeding century quarantine was prac- 

 ticed on the same lines in all European countries engaged in Eastern, 

 American, and African trade, England excepted. 



The international sanitary conferences at Paris in 1851 and 1852, in 

 which participated the different European powers having interests in 

 the Mediterranean, marked the close of the old regime of quarantine. 



