A Display to the Royal Philatelic Society London by members of the Disinfected Mail Study Circle

on the occasion of their 30th Anniversary

6 November 2003

21.8.1839. Constantinople to London, via Vienna and Huningue. Opened at Semlin for fumigation and closed with wax SIGIL. SANITATIS SEMLINIENSIS, confirmed by the cachet NETTO DI FUORA ET DI DENTRO. A second treatment is evidenced by an unique French oval cachet, 'LAZARET / TR-2'

The French frontier exchange offices like Huningue, (Marque d'entree on address panel), were never authorised to use disinfection cachets. This bold initiative must have been quashed immediately after 'Tranche 2 ' (presumably the second batch of the day), had been treated. No other office followed suit.

A Potted History of the Disinfection of Mail

The disinfection of mail was not an occasional happening, like disaster mail resulting from the sinking of ships or the crash of an aircraft. It was rather the 'logical' outcome of a near-universal belief that infectious diseases could be brought into a healthy country by susceptible goods, including paper.

This belief, which was still held by many countries until late in the 19th. century, was unfounded, in so far as none of the diseases against which disinfection had been practised - plague, yellow fever, typhus fever, cholera and leprosy included - could be transmitted on dry paper. But this was not established scientifically until modern times : in the 1880s in the case of cholera, and the first decade of the 20th. century for yellow fever. Ironically, smallpox, a disease against which disinfection was hardly ever employed, can be so conveyed ; and the virus can be very easily destroyed by heat, even a hot iron.

The Republics of Venice and Ragusa, (Dubrovnik), enforced quarantine from the 1370s. Out of this grew a complex of health passports, ships' bills of health, quarantine guards and lazarettos, yielding a wealth of ephemera. The same States introduced the 'perfuming' of mail from the Levant with sweet-smelling herbs and flowers a half-century later : a treatment which left no discernible traces. With the advent of the terrible plagues of the mid-17th c., most Mediterranean ports smoked or scorched mail from suspect vessels, sometimes after dousing it with vinegar. But wafers or seals, legitimising the opening of covers to treat the contents, are not seen before the 1720s. The earliest cachets to certify treatment appeared in the 1780's.

Europe (other than Russia and the Balkans) was generally spared plague after the end of the 18th.c., though there were isolated outbreaks in the Ionian Islands and at Noja, near Bari. But yellow fever, which had occasioned disinfection of mail from the Caribbean in particular, visited ports in Spain and Italy in 1805, resulting in a resurgence of the treatment of mail, even in Northern European countries.

After a period of relatively few scares, in 1831 the western world faced a new threat : cholera, which had escaped from India, (its reservoir even now, as it was then). It came to Europe via Persia and Russia in the contamination of water sources. In the ensuing panic, even countries like Germany, which had been sceptical of the virtues of treatment of mail, rushed into action. The old Cordon Sanitaire against plague was resurrected by Austria and mail was treated in virtually every country in the known world : but by the mid-1840s disinfection was little used, except in eastern Europe against plague.

An epidemic of cholera in Egypt in 1884 resulted in a brief renewal of measures especially in Italy, but most countries anticipated the verdict of the 1893 International Sanitary Congress, that 'letters, news-papers and books should be free of all restrictions' - but only against cholera. The Americans still disinfected mail against yellow fever and bubonic plague on isolated occasions, most notably in Hawaii, and the Russians redoubled their efforts against Persia and the Far East in the 1890s when both plague and cholera raged, until 1911.

In the 20th. century, mail was very sensibly treated to prevent transmission of smallpox until its final eradication in the 1970s, most notably in Austrian military hospitals in W.W.1 :. but it was also used in American T.B. Sanatoria, in leper colonies, and even against foot-and-mouth disease in a Swiss canton.

The anthrax scare in the U.S.A., on the heels of the terrorist outrages of September 2001, resulted in measures to irradiate mail there ; and some rather half-hearted inspection in Europe and Australia. This has resulted in 21st. century examples of collectable items, a hitherto unimaginable development.

The D.M.S.C. joint display of November 2003 attempted to show this long and complex story in chronological sequence, so that contributions by individual members were not necessarily shown in discrete batches, since material was shown in the appropriate time period.

The display was a product of the following members:

Alan Becker, Andrew Cheung, Luciano de Zanche, Guy Dutau, Hedy Faibel, Paul Hirsch, William Sandrik, Hans Smith, V Denis Vandervelde and Antony Virvilis.

Enquiries about D.M.S.C. membership should be sent to V Denis Vandervelde at vdvpratique@aol.com