Abstract
Epidemic disease, like war, is the health of the state. Since the dawn of the American Republic, state and local governments have wielded powers both plenary and plentiful to defend the people against smallpox, yellow fever, cholera, and other pestilences. Individual liberty and property rights melted away before the state's power—indeed its inherent legal duty—to protect the population from peril. Under the broad authority of the police power, state and local governments in the nineteenth century confined suspected disease-carriers against their will, established armed quarantines on land and at sea, seized private homes for smallpox pest houses, and enacted, in the approving words of the U.S. Supreme Court, “health laws of every description.”