The social distancing requirements of today are stressful, but are much less deadly than measures of combating disease in the Middle Ages. Our word “quarantine” comes from the Italian words “quaranta giorni” for forty days, which was a standard length of time that sick and infected people would be shut off from the healthy population.
The Medieval quarantine developed from the Italian Venician response to the Black Death pandemic of 1347-1349. Incoming ships would have to self-quarantine before being allowed to unload, but eventually the practice morphed into other expressions of creating space between the infected and the healthy. The methods of quarantining could be brutal. In 1374 in the city of Milan, for example, everyone with an illness had to leave the city “and take to the open country, living either in huts or in the woods until [they] died or recovered.”. A very busy quarantine spot of the Later Middle Ages was the small island comprising part of the city of Venice, known as the “Lazzaretto Vecchio” shown in this image. Plague victims were shuffled off there beginning in 1400, and conditions were horrifying. In the 16th century, the Venetian Rocco Benedetti wrote that the Lazzaretto Vecchio seemed like Hell itself . . . Some who miraculously returned from that place alive reported, among other things, that at the height of that great influx of infected people there were three and four of them to a bed.”
Source(s): Sources: DOI: lauramorelli.com/the-pesthouses-of-venice/; _National Geographic, “Mass Plague Graves Found on Venice ‘Quarantine’ Island,” Maria Cristina Valsecchi, August 29, 2007; “The Medieval Origins of Quarantine,” DOI: medievalists.net/2020/03/medieval-origins-quarantine/ .
