quarantine

quarantine All laws of quarantine have their origin and basis in the concept of disease transmission by contagion. Quarantine is a term which has been applied to many different systems of disease prevention, but it is generally used in two specific senses: first, it involves the segregation and isolation of individuals, suspected of being infected with a communicable disease, for at least the period of likely incubation; more generally, it refers to the maritime practice of forcibly detaining and segregating all vessels arriving in port, together with the people and things on board, when suspected of certain diseases, for specified periods, usually about forty days. The individuals quarantined may in each case be perfectly healthy, but the suspicion that they are harbouring disease provokes the application of quarantine procedures. The most notorious current practice of quarantine regards the entry of domestic pets and minor livestock into the UK.

The first known law of segregation on account of disease was enacted by the Emperor Justinian in ad 542. The earliest definite regulations against the spread of disease were, however, developed by Italian city states under the threat of bubonic plague in the fourteenth century. Venice, the great entrepôt of trade with the east, probably issued regulations as early as 1127, and was the first city to issue a complete quarantine code in 1448. This code provided the model for all subsequent regulations over the next four centuries. Initially these European quarantines were limited to the exclusion of goods and people from stricken localities, but as time went on they were increasingly extended to foreign places as well, especially in sea ports.

By the sixteenth century the practice of quarantine was well established across Europe, and British governments also began to adopt the policy. It was not until the eighteenth century, however, that comprehensive codes of practice were put into place in response to the last outbursts of plague on the European continent — in the Baltic states between 1709 and 1712, and at Marseilles in 1721. These early eighteenth-century regulations were apparently successful at staving off the menace of plague, and were repeatedly revised and renewed over the next hundred years.

The arrival of Asiatic cholera in Europe in 1830, against which quarantines proved singularly ineffective, heralded the demise of the system. In England, commercial and trade interests were already beginning to protest against the restrictions imposed by the system in the mid 1820s, and the experiences with cholera in 1832 and 1848 confirmed commercial opposition to the practice. Both England and France, as colonial trading powers with wide international interests, increasingly questioned the necessity of quarantine, and in 1851 an international congress was called to consider the issue. In following decades, opposition from countries like Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Sweden was gradually eroded at a series of international congresses, and by the successful development by the British of a rival system of surveillance and port supervision. Indeed, the development of the electric telegraph, which so greatly facilitated international communications, permitted the dissemination not only of information on local disease prevalences, but also on the route, condition, and expected arrival of individual ships. Technological developments, as much as commercial pressures, were critical in undermining the rationale for international quarantine systems. At the congresses of Venice and Dresden in 1892 and 1893, the international quarantine system was largely dismantled, to be replaced by supervision systems on the British model. For some years, however, quarantine remained an issue with regard to India, partly because of her reputation as the home of cholera and of plague, and partly because of the complications of the annual pilgrimages of Indian Muslims to Mecca and Medina.

Even into the twentieth century, quarantines were occasionally imposed under the threat of invading epidemics, as when Sydney was quarantined by other Australian states on the outbreak of plague there in 1900. On the smaller scale, too, informal domestic household quarantines continued to be adopted, until well into the twentieth century, for children and adults potentially incubating infectious diseases such as measles and chicken-pox.

Anne Hardy

See also infectious diseases.