The article examines the features of the legal writing of regulatory instruments governing measures for combating epidemics in the 19th to the early 20th century. The features of the legal writing of the specified period include the imperfection of sanitary and anti-epidemic laws, which was characterized by the vagueness of legislative definitions, inconsistency and incompleteness of the presentation of legal provisions of regulatory instruments, duplication of provisions in documents, fragmentation, casualness of the presentation of regulatory prescriptions, a high degree of bureaucratization, and haste in the adoption of laws and subordinate regulations.