Quarantine, a Short History

The Decameron, subtitled Prince Galehaut (Old Italian: Prencipe Galeotto) and sometimes nicknamed l'Umana commedia ("the Human comedy"), is a collection of novellas by the 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375). The book is structured as a frame story containing 100 tales told by a group of seven young women and three young men sheltering in a secluded villa just outside Florence to escape the Black Death, which was afflicting the city. Boccaccio probably conceived of The Decameron after the epidemic of 1348, and completed it by 1353. The various tales of love in The Decameron range from the erotic to the tragic. Tales of wit, practical jokes, and life lessons contribute to the mosaic. In addition to its literary value and widespread influence (for example on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales), it provides a document of life at the time. Written in the vernacular of the Florentine language, it is considered a masterpiece of classical early Italian prose.

Mavi Boncuk |

Pictured A Poster for Spanish Flu from Japan 1919

An early mention of isolation occurs in the Biblical book of Leviticus written in the seventh century BC or perhaps earlier tells how to quarantine people with leprosy, as a procedure for separating out infected people to prevent spread of disease under the Mosaic Law:

"If the shiny spot on the skin is white but does not appear to be more than skin deep and the hair in it has not turned white, the priest is to isolate the affected person for seven days. On the seventh day the priest is to examine him, and if he sees that the sore is unchanged and has not spread in the skin, he is to isolate him for another seven days.

Hippocrates covered the issue in a three-volume set on epidemics, though he came from a time in ancient Ionia (Today’s Aegean Turkey)  when disease was thought to spread from “miasmas,” or foul-smelling gas that came out of the ground.

The involuntary hospital quarantine of special groups of patients, including those with leprosy, started early in Islamic history. Between 706 and 707 AD the sixth Umayyad caliph Al-Walid I built the first hospital in Damascus and issued an order to isolate those infected with leprosy from other patients in the hospital. 

The practice of involuntary quarantine of leprosy in general hospitals continued until the year 1431, when the Ottomans built a leprosy hospital in Edirne. Incidents of quarantine occurred throughout the Muslim world, with evidence of voluntary community quarantine in some of these reported incidents. The first documented involuntary community quarantine was established by the Ottoman quarantine reform in 1838.


See also: Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean
By Nukhet Varlik

ISD LLC, Apr 30, 2017 - History - 335 pages

It wasn't until the Black Death of the 14th century, however, that Venice established the first formal system of quarantine, requiring ships to lay at anchor for 40 days before landing. ("Quarantine" comes from the Latin|Venetiano for forty.) The strategies recently adopted in Italy have their roots in the past. From the onset of the Black Death in 1347-48, Italian cities implemented a complex health defense system, which was an example to other European countries. The cornerstones of this health defense system lay in quarantine, sanitary cordons, lazarets (quarantine stations), disinfection and social regulation of the population at risk. 

Medicine played no part: its impotence in dealing with epidemic diseases left health defense to the initiative of the civil authorities. There was also a dark side of quarantine. Quarantine and isolation helped lead to discrimination against the weakest social groups, not to mention minorities like Venice’s Jewish population.

In fact, the first to refine a system of defense against disease was Venice which, because of its particular geographic location and its great importance as a commercial center, was dangerously exposed to the plague arriving by sea. But while the waters of the lagoon were a corridor for the passage of an epidemic, they were also a natural cordon sanitaire that facilitated an efficient quarantine system as a bulwark against the disease for the rest of Italy.

1348

Venice establishes the world's first institutionalized system of quarantine, giving a council of three the power to detain ships, cargoes, and individuals in the Venetian lagoon for up to 40 days. The act comes in the midst of the Black Death, a plague epidemic that eventually takes the lives of 14 to 15 million people across Europe, or up to one-fifth of the population.

Bubonic plague in Venice (1370)

The so-called Black Death killed 20 million Europeans in the 14th century. So Venice, a major trade port, grew nervous. If a ship was suspected of harboring plague, it had to wait 40 days before any passengers or goods could come ashore. Venice built a hospital/quarantine center on an island off its coast, where sailors from plague-infested ships were sent either to get better, or, more likely, to die. This 40-day waiting period became known as quarantinario, from the Italian word for 40. As opinions about the disease changed, the isolation period shrank to trentinario — 30 days — but the original name stuck.

1850-1851

Following horrific epidemics of plague and cholera that spread through Europe from Egypt and Turkey towards the middle of the 19th century, the first international sanitary conference is held in Paris, with an eye to making quarantine an international cooperative effort. These sanitary conferences continue well into the 20th century.

 The caption to this drawing from an 1858 issue of Harper's Weekly quotes a Dr. Anderson as saying: "While the Angel of Death rides on the fumes of the iron scow, and infected airs are wafted to our shores from the anchorage, we shall have no security against these annual visitations of pestilence."
© Corbis Images

Lazarus, the sore-covered leper in Christ's parable, became the patron saint of leprosy, which was perhaps the first "quarantinable" disease. The term "lazaretto," which refers to a quarantine hospital or station, may be a combination of his name and Santa Maria di Nazareth, the church on the Venetian island where the first quarantine station was opened.
© Corbis Images/Barnes Foundation

In the Middle Ages, no disease wreaked such havoc across Europe as bubonic plague. In this woodcut from 1512, a doctor and his assistants tend to a plague patient.
© Corbis Images

"The kind of 'assisted emigrant' we can not afford to admit." So reads the caption to this 1883 Puck drawing, which shows members of the New York Board of Health wielding a bottle of carbolic acid, a disinfectant, in their attempts to keep cholera at bay.
© Corbis Images