HAVE YOU BEEN QUARANTINED? HAS 14 DAYS BEEN TOO MUCH?

 QUARANTINE  A bit of the history of the word.  In the USA a quarter coin.  In the U.K. a quarter as a measurement (" a quarter pound of  sweets (candies)  please")

The Spanish, French and Italian words for "four" have a similar root.

Thus the original quarantines were for forty days (maybe with the idea that Jesus had been  in the wilderness for forty days)

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Here is a neat piece from the Croatian Tourist authority about Quarantine and Lazarettos in Dubrovnic.

FOREGROUND  

  The Lazaretto near Dubrovnik’s (Croatia)  eastern gate.

A Lazaretto?    Here is the story.

 

Since the Middle Ages, Dubrovnik developed the trading activities by sea, but also with the hinterlands and in the 14th century it was already a very successful business town. During the medieval period it often faced leprosy and other contagious diseases and because of that there were special areas outside the city, leprosariums, where the people with leprosy were isolated and several legal provisions in the Dubrovnik Statute regulated the society’s relation towards the lepers. In the mid 14th century the Great Plague, known as the Black Death, spread all over Europe and, unfortunately, Dubrovnik was not left out; the plague took many lives. In spite of it, life and trading activity went on, so in 1377 the Dubrovnik government issued the regulation that “every ship arriving from a pestilential area, with its crew, passengers and goods, needed to stop in the nearby island of Mrkan and Cavtat on the mainland for thirty days before coming into the town. After a while, the period was prolonged to forty days (ital. quaranta – forty) and that originated the word quarantine. Later was decided that the ships should stop in the islands of Bobara, Supetar and also Mljet.

The conceptual originality of this decision was the attempt of prevention of the contagious disease and not isolating already infected people. This slowed the circulation of people and the goods traffic, but it didn’t stop the economy completely.

A view of the lazaretto near Dubrovnik’s eastern gate (Ploče), and a view inside the lazaretto.

In the beginning, the people stayed in provisional huts or in already existing buildings (such as the Benedictine monastery on Mljet). The huts could be easily burnt down as a measure of disinfection, but also because the Dubrovnik government didn’t want solid buildings in the places that an enemy could use for its base. During the 15th and the 16th century there were many epidemics of plague and that led to the construction of new lazzarettos for the isolation of the infected (in the western part of town called Danče, on Lokum island) and, finally, after considerable hesitation, it was decided that a new, big lazaretto should be built close to the eastern town’s gate, in Ploče area.

TCJ: How did Dubrovnik’s contemporaries handle the threat of infectious diseases? Was Dubrovnik’s position any different? How?

Marina: For what I’ve read, Venice, Genova and other merchant city states also introduced the decisions about isolating the infected in determined areas and about stopping the ships arriving from the suspicious regions; as in Dubrovnik, also in Venice there was a special sanitary commission composed of noblemen who controlled the hygienic conditions in the town, registered the deaths, took care of the clothes and objects remained after the deceased etc. In the 15th century Venice founded the first lazzaretto, that is, a place with a public hospital determined to isolate and take care of the infected.

Dubrovnik’s position was somehow different. By the end of the 15th century the Ottomans conquered the today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina which meant that just few miles away from the town there was the border with the Ottoman Empire.

 Dubrovnik had established good diplomatic relations with the Turks even before and continued with a successful trade activity all through the Ottoman territory. Unfortunately, the plague often spread to Dubrovnik territory from there and that is why the whole area next to the eastern town’s gate, Ploče, was used as a quarantine. Before the construction of the big lazaretto there were smaller buildings used for quarantine or even private houses where the merchants, or Dubrovnik diplomats who were coming back from their missions in the Ottoman Empire, needed to stay during their quarantine period. In 1647 was finished the big complex of Lazareti (lazarettos) containing ten buildings and five inner courtyards for the accommodation of the quarantined passengers and the warehouses where the goods were deposed and ventilated. Lazareti were used as a quarantine for the ships and for the caravans. The duration period of the quarantine was determined by the sanitary commission according to where the passengers were coming from and the evaluation of the risk of a disease in that moment. It could vary from 7, 8 to 40 days. Lazareti were used as a quarantine, more or less intensively, until 1870-ies.