Great Plague of Marseille

The Great Plague of Marseille was the last of the significant European outbreaks of bubonic plague. Arriving in Marseille, France in 1720, the disease killed 100,000 people in the city and the surrounding provinces. However, Marseille recovered quickly from the plague outbreak. Economic activity took only a few years to recover, as trade expanded to the West Indies and Latin America. By 1765, the growing population was back at its pre-1720 level.

At the end of the plague of 1580, the people at Marseilles took dramatic measures to attempt to control the future spread of disease. The city council of Marseilles established a sanitation board, whose members were to be drawn from the city council as well as the doctors of the city. The exact founding date of the board is unknown, but its existence is first mentioned in a 1622 text of the Parlement of Aix. The newly established sanitation board then made a series of recommendations for maintaining the health of the city.

The most major component of the sanitation board was to establish a bureaucracy for the maintaining of the health of Marseilles. In addition to protecting the city from exterior vulnerabilities, the sanitation board sought to build a public infrastructure. The first public hospital of Marseilles was also built during this time period, complete with a full-sized staff of doctors and nurses. Additionally, the sanitation board was responsible for the accreditation of local doctors. Citing the vast amount of misinformation that propagates during a plague, the sanitation board sought to at a minimum provide citizens with a list of doctors whom were believed to be credible.

The sanitation board was one of the first executive bodies formed by the city of Marseilles, and it was equipped with a full-time staff to adequately address the growing needs of the board's responsibilities.

The largest component of the health system of Marseilles was the three-tiered quarantine system. Members of the Sanitation board inspected all incoming ships and gave them one of three bills of health. The “bill of health” then determined the ship and its cargo's access to the city.

A delegation of members of the sanitation board was to greet every incoming ship. They were then to ask for the captain’s log, which recorded every city the ship had landed in, and to consult the sanitation board's master list of cities throughout the Mediterranean who had rumors of recent plague activity. The delegation also inspected all the cargo, crew and passengers looking for signs of possible disease. Should they see signs of disease, the ships were to be turned away from Marseilles docks. If there were no signs of disease, but the ship’s itinerary included a city with documented plague activity, then the ship was sent to the second tier of quarantine on islands outside of Marseilles harbor. The criteria for the lazarettos were ventilation (to drive off the miasma of disease), be near the sea to facilitate communication and pumping of water to clean, and must be isolated yet be easily accessible.

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