Table 5.

Containment measures to avoid disease spread over the millennia.

Years	Source	Measurements	References
430–428 BCE	Plague of Athens	The containment strategies used included the application of purifications and incantations and the enforcement of abstinence from baths and many food items then considered noxious to diseased people	[119]
541–755	Plague of Justinian	The containment strategies included unspecified traditional public health measures and quarantine	[119]
	Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), in his book The Decameron	Written in Tuscan vernacular (Italian). The book is a collection of short stories told by a group of seven young women and three young men sheltering in a villa just outside Florence to escape the black death that afflicted that city. Boccaccio probably conceived his masterpiece of classical Italian Renaissance prose after the plague epidemic of 1348, which came to a standstill by 1353
1377, 1397	“De ordinibus contra eos qui veniunt de loc ispestiferis anno 1397 factis”	Quarantine was first introduced in Dubrovnik on Croatia’s Dalmatian Coast	[120]
	Orders made against those who come to the place of the pestiferous in 1397	The Great Council of Ragusa specified again the 30-day duration of quarantine and determined the place
1423, 1448	Venetian Senate	First permanent plague hospital (lazaretto) was opened by the Republic of Venice in 1423 on the small island of Santa Maria di Nazareth.Prolonged the waiting period to 40 days, thus giving birth to the term “quarantine”	[121]
1467		Genoa adopted the Venetian system	[119]
1476		In Marseille, France, a hospital for persons with leprosy was converted into a lazaretto	[121]
1480	Marsilio Ficino, “Consilio contro la pestilentia”	When you converse, stay away from your partner at least two arms, and in the open place, and when it is suspicious, let us stay at least six fathoms longer, and out in the open, and let the wind not be reversed by him
1589	Viceroy of Peru	Lima physicians advised the use of quarantine among all native communities to prevent further spread of the disease	[119]
1663		English quarantine regulations provided for the confinement (in the Thames estuary) of ships with suspected plague-infected passengers or crew	[121]
1665	A journal of the plague year by Daniel Defoe	It was a rule with those who had thus two houses in their keeping or care, that if anybody was taken sick in a family, before the master of the family let the examiners or any other officer know of it, he immediately would send all the rest of his family, whether children or servants, as it fell out to be, to such other house which he had so in charge, and then giving notice of the sick person to the examiner, have a nurse or nurses appointed, and have another person to be shut up in the house with them (which many for money would do), so to take charge of the house in case the person should die	[122]
1688 and 1691		Quarantine to control yellow fever which first appeared in New York and Boston	[121]
1796		United States introduced quarantine legislation in port cities threatened by yellow fever from the West Indies	[123]
1799		In the harbor of Philadelphia, the first quarantine station was built after a previous yellow fever outbreak in 1793	[123]
1878		Release of the National Quarantine Act, which shifted quarantine power from single states to the federal government	[123]
1944		The federal government quarantine authority was set up	[123]