Quarantine

On July 27, 1377, the Great Council of Ragusa, now Dubrovnik in Croatia, ruled that anyone coming from a place with plague must first spend a month on the islet of Mrkan or in the nearby town of Cavtat. Ragusans were forbidden to visit them, or to bring them food unless the council had assigned them to; anyone who broke these rules was fined and isolated for a month.

The word comes from the Italian quaranta, "forty." Over the next decades many places lengthened the wait to 40 days. Venice and Florence ordered streets cleaned in 1348, but historians date the first quarantine to Ragusa's law of 1377. In 1423 Venice opened a permanent plague hospital, or lazaretto, on the island of Santa Maria di Nazareth. No one knows why 40 days was chosen. Suggestions include the Hippocratic idea that acute illnesses run their course within 40 days, the 40 days Jesus spent in the desert, and the belief that bad air needed that long to leave bodies and goods. Already during the Black Death some cities posted armed guards on roads and shut out strangers, merchants, Jews, and people with leprosy; later, ports required bills of health for ships.

When cholera reached Europe in 1830, governments used the old plague measures again. These brought fear, resentment, and some uprisings. Opponents said quarantine was useless and harmed trade. Against cholera and yellow fever it did little, though a strict guard could protect a small island: Sardinia escaped cholera in 1835–36. In 1918 cities closed schools, churches, and theaters against influenza, and the rules often fell hardest on marginalized groups and colonized peoples. The historian Eugenia Tognotti calls quarantine effective and valuable but always debated: a balance between public interest and individual rights.

Library texts show quarantine from both sides. In The Pestilence Comes to Florence, 1348, officials clean the streets and keep out the sick. In A London Diary of the Plague Year, 1665, Pepys sees houses shut up and marked with red crosses. Pushkin's letters in An Island Surrounded by Quarantines show roads closed and letters pierced and smoked. The Plague Act and the House Searches, Bombay 1897 gives the colonial government's account of its searches and the resistance to them. Why Single Out One? A Scientist on Typhoid Mary asks whether it is fair to hold one healthy carrier while others go free.