In 1710, a plague epidemic around the Baltic Sea led England to pass the Quarantine Act that required a mandatory 40-day quarantine for “arriving ships, goods cannot be removed, and serious breaches of the act can result in the death penalty.”

A decade later, Britain descended into panic again when plague killed about 100,000 people in the port of Marseille between 1720 and 1722. Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1722, was successful because it addressed a topic which was on everybody’s mind at that time.

Consequently the bill repealing the 1710 Quarantine Act and replacing it with stricter regulations went through both houses of Parliament quickly and received the royal assent on 25 January 1721.