“One foot in the brothel, the other in the hospital,” goes the old saying, as applicable centuries ago as today. A universal for all mortals, disease is also an artifact of history. Patients racked by the fastigium of illness will take little comfort from the insight that they are suffering from a historical construct with only contingent objective reality, but scholars have found the multiplicity and mutability of illness irresistible. This diversity of signification attached to disease itself holds equally for the means employed to prevent and contain its spread. Why such precautions, the prophylactic strategies adopted in hopes of avoiding or ameliorating the ravages of epidemics, have varied dramatically among nations even though, in biological terms, the problem faced by each has been much the same is the question in search of an answer. Medical history is the immediate subject, but the ultimate purposes of this study extend beyond the precisely scientific. Since at least the era of absolutism, preventing and dealing with contagious and epidemic disease have together been one of the major tasks of states. When Cicero advised rulers to consider the salus populi as the highest law, he was thinking more of military security than sewers, but his dictum was soon to be interpreted as a reference to the public health.