Great Plague of Marseilles

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 a total of 100,000 people: 50,000 in the city during the next two years and another 50,000 to the north in surrounding provinces and towns.

Despite the large number of deaths, 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 made a series of recommendations to maintain the health of the city.

They established a bureaucracy to maintain 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, and was given 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 who were believed to be credible.

The sanitation board was one of the first executive bodies formed by the city of Marseilles. It was staffed to support the board's increasing responsibilities.

The Sanitation Board established a three-tiered control and quarantine system. Members of the board inspected all incoming ships and gave them one of three "bills of health". The “bill of health” then determined the level of access to the city by the ship and its cargo.

A delegation of members of the sanitation board was to greet every incoming ship. They reviewed the captain’s log, which recorded every city the ship had landed in, and checked it against the sanitation board's master list of cities throughout the Mediterranean that had rumors of recent plague incidents. The delegation also inspected all the cargo, crew and passengers, looking for signs of possible disease. If the team saw signs of disease, the ship was not allowed to land at a Marseilles dock.

If the ship passed that first test and there were no signs of disease, but the ship’s itinerary included a city with documented plague activity, the ship was sent to the second tier of quarantine, at islands outside of Marseilles harbor. The criteria for the lazarets were ventilation (to drive off what was thought to be the miasma of disease), be near the sea to facilitate communication and pumping of water to clean, and to be isolated yet easily accessible.

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