This paper analyses the context in which the European Commission of the Danube (ECD), an international organisation created in 1856 to improve navigation along the Maritime Danube, started to impose its own public health policies in the Danube Delta region. It established two hospitals and drafted detailed quarantine regulations meant to balance free navigation and sanitary precautions. The authors refer to the organisation of ECD"s hospitals, how commissioners dealt with their funding, selection mechanisms for medical staff and the need to build proper medical facilities. The paper also touches on the moment when in 1865 Sulina was ravaged by a cholera epidemic and the local hospital was put to good use. Eventually, through a Public Act signed by the seven commissioners in 1865, the ECD was consolidated as an international organisation and the hospital became a reputed medical centre for hundreds of international seafarers, ECD employees and inhabitants of Sulina, who used the services of the first hospital created by an early supranational institution.
This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. Chapter 8 The Lower Danube and Romanian Nation-Making We accept the strictest regulations designed to ensure freedom for all flags, we accept the most rigorous control for the application of these regulations, but we want to see that in Romanian waters these regulations are applied by Romanian authorities.
This paper explores the social dimension of cruising by looking at new forms of sociality created by the advent of steamboats along the Danube and in the Black Sea. Since a Viennese steamship company introduced cruises between Vienna and Istanbul in the mid-1830s, Austrian steamboats became a busy stage of diverse social encounters. The idea of ships as “floating spaces”, “historical arenas” or “contact zones” in which different cultures meet has been developed by scholars for a long time. Framed within the new mobilities paradigm, this paper details a large range of social interactions on board Austrian steamers based on the accounts of more than a dozen travellers who plied along the Vienna–Istanbul route in the mid-1830s to the mid-1850s. With sociality as an integral part of modern transportation, this paper analyses the early phases in the industrialisation and commodification of travelling and focuses on the social experiences that steamboat cruising provided to customers.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.