Gazette Of The United States, & Philadelphia Daily Advertiser

Extracts from the minutes of the Board of Health, 6th mo. 14th, 1799:

The necessity of adopting some strenuous measures to prevent the intercourse by boats both from the city and the Jersey shore, and also of that of preventing the sailors straggling from vessels under quarantine or leaving the ship during her passage up the Delaware; being under consideration: It was resolved, that the physician and quarantine master, be directed to require of the master or other person or persons on board every vessel under quarantine on his or their oaths or affirmations whether, any person has been on board of the vessel during the time she lay under quarantine, and also whether any person has been on shore by swimming or otherwise, and that they inform the masters of the vessels under quarantine, that if they by any means shall elude this question they will be prosecuted, and that, even by their own confession it shall appear that any communication was had with the shore by either of the above means, that unless they give immediate information of the circumstance and detain the offender on board the vessel until the physician and quarantine master shall take charge of him or them; that the vessel will be detained under quarantine for a longer period than that prescribed by law.

As the few cases of the Yellow Fever which took place in this city this season were generally said to have been communicated from the ship General Wayne, we hope the utmost attention will be paid to all vessels arriving from infected places. The detention of a vessel at Staten Island for a few days may be termed a performance of quarantine, but if the cargo is not properly aired, and the vessel ventilated and purified from all noxious exhalations or disagreeable smells, such quarantine will be totally useless, productive of no beneficial good, but injurious to the owners and the concerned.

However strong visionary Theorists may insist that there is no necessity for quarantine laws, nor no reason to fear contagion, yet it is dangerous to rely upon their assurances. Our atmosphere during the heat of the summer months is too fruitful a soil to have it impregnated with the seeds of the foreign petilence. That the epidemics which have so repeatedly scourged our sea ports were generated from local causes, we do not attempt to deny; but as the importation of disease is possible, we have just cause to apply all the preventatives which human wisdom can devise or circumstances can allow to arrest the progress of foreign disease towards our shores.

The extreme and tediousness of last winter, added to the frigidity and backwardness of spring, might lead us to expect that we would not be visited by the fever this year. It is necessary to say we hope this idea may be realized, yet we are anxious that such an expectation should not induce the health officers and citizens to relax, a particle of that care and attention which is absolutely necessary to annihilate, if possible, the domestic causes which may give birth to so dreadful an evil.—

[N. Y. Argus.]