Charles Maclean

(c. 1765 - c. 1825)

The East India Company surgeon Charles Maclean—author of Evils of Quarantine Laws and Nonexistence of Pestilential Contagion—spent much of his free time arguing that diseases could not be contagious, going so far as to stay at the germ-filled Greek Pest Hospital in Constantinople in 1817. When he caught the plague there, he saved himself, he claimed, through a treatment of “calomel, opium, laudanum, brandy, wines, a nourishing diet, and bathing in a nitric-acid solution.”