These examples are not adduced for the purpose of casting obloquy on Sir Henry Halford, Dr Maton, and the other eminent physicians their colleagues, who vainly attempted to reduce to practice in the nineteenth century, the standard but obsolete doctrines taught, almost universally, in the medical schools in the country; but solely for the purpose of displaying the state of the science of Public Health in the year 1831–2, as far as the physicians of highest reputation and largest practice may be taken as its exponents.—_Origin and Progress of Sanitary Reform, by T. Jones Howell._ The consideration of the common properties of pestilence, under whatever form or name it may occur, has led to the general conclusion that the true safeguards against pestilential diseases are not quarantine regulations, but sanitary measures—that is to say, measures which tend to prevent or remove certain conditions, without which pestilential diseases appear to be incapable of existing. The whole machinery of quarantine is based on the assumption that by an absolute interdiction of communication with the sick, either by the person or by infected articles, it can prevent the introduction of epidemic disease into an unaffected community. But this assumption overlooks the essential condition on which epidemic disease depends, namely,—the presence of an epidemic atmosphere, without which it is now generally admitted that no contagion, whether imported or native, can cause a disease to spread epidemically. Allowing, therefore, to contagion all the influence which any one supposes it to possess, and to quarantine all the control over it which it claims, there remains the condition, the primary and essential condition, which confessedly it cannot reach, namely, the epidemic atmosphere. Experience affords evidence that the influence of an epidemic atmosphere may exist over thousands of square miles, and yet affect only particular localities. The cases of cholera which have occurred in numerous and widely distant parts of England and Scotland mark the presence of the epidemic influence; yet over this extended area cholera has fixed itself and prevailed as an epidemic only in very few places. Why has it localized itself in these particular places? Probably because it has there found conditions of a specific kind, either local or personal, or both. It follows that our true course is to make diligent search for all localizing circumstances, and to remove them, so as to render the locality untenantable for the epidemic. But quarantine makes no such search, and leaves all localizing conditions untouched and unthought of.