From leprosy to coronavirus, the birth of quarantine is ancient

(by Pier David Malloni) - Quarantine is one of the most ancient methods to combat infectious diseases, so much so that it was already mentioned in the Old Testament, long before the origin of the pathologies was known. In a period in which the practice is being repeated all over the world because of the coronavirus, Leslie S. Leighton, historian of Georgia University, remembers that the republic of Venice was the first to codify forced isolation.
The first disease against which quarantine was used, says the article in The Conversation, is leprosy, to which various passages of the Bible refer, and also in ancient Greece this method was used against pathologies capable of spreading. The practice was used throughout the Middle Ages, but it is with the plague epidemic of the fourteenth century, which killed between 40 and 50 million Europeans, that the 'modern' form of quarantine is affirmed. It is in this period that the name is also coined, which derives from the period of 40 days (which at first were 30) that the ships had to wait before entering the port of Ragusa, today's Dubrovnik.
In the following centuries, isolation was used to fight various diseases, from yellow fever to cholera.
In colonial America, the first example dates back to 1663 in New York, in an attempt to stop a smallpox outbreak. The city in 1730 intended an entire island, Bedloe, for this purpose.
An example that became famous in the United States is that of Mary Mellon, who later became known as 'Tiphoid Mary', a healthy cook with typhoid fever who in the early 1900s had infected the family where she worked. After a first three-year quarantine, the woman was released with the promise, then broken, that she would never cook for anyone again. In recent years, the expert notes, quarantine has been used for several epidemics, from the flu to Sars in Ebola, although the one that is being used against coronavirus is probably the most impressive.