Ottoman and Egyptian Quarantines and European Debates on Plague in the 1830s–1840s*

Abstract

In the 1830s, plague, which had been all but forgotten by most Europeans, was on everyone’s lips again. Shortly after the Ottoman and Egyptian governments instituted their first permanent quarantines, the disease broke out in the Levant and the Nile delta, and the global medical community watched anxiously to see whether these new western Mediterranean-style quarantines would be able to contain it within the eastern Mediterranean. By tracing two Russian medical expeditions from the Black Sea port of Odessa to the Ottoman empire and Egypt in the 1840s, this article examines the world of European medical practitioners who engaged in vigorous debates about plague and its prevention. Did the disease have a ‘birthplace’ somewhere in the Middle East? Did it spread through contact with its victims, or was it omnipresent in the bad air? Russian, French, British and other medics questioned old assumptions about plague and its contagiousness, while testing out their hypotheses in Ottoman and Egyptian domains. By the 1840s, the Middle East had become a global site for epidemiological research, driving the internationalization of prevention against epidemic. Meanwhile, Ottoman and Egyptian quarantines, and the elusive nature of plague, became entangled with European political ambitions and commercial interests in the Middle East.