U.S. President Nixon greeting the crew of Apollo 11 in quarantine upon their return from the moon, 24 July 1969
10 May 2020
A quarantine is a period of isolation, especially one necessitated to stop or slow the transmission of a disease. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) differentiates the word from isolation:
Isolation and quarantine help protect the public by preventing exposure to people who have or may have a contagious disease.
Isolation separates sick people with a contagious disease from people who are not sick.
Quarantine separates and restricts the movement of people who were exposed to a contagious disease to see if they become sick.
Quarantine comes to English from medieval Latin, both directly and via French and Italian. The medieval Latin quarentena is a variation of the classical Latin quadraginta, meaning the number forty. Quarentena had a number of senses dating from the twelfth century in Anglo-Latin texts, all relating to measurements involving the number forty. It could mean a furlong (i.e., 40 rods) in length or an area measuring a furlong on all four sides (roughly ten acres). Or in could refer to a period of forty days in various religious, legal, or diplomatic contexts. It could also refer to the location in the wilderness where Christ fasted for forty days and nights.
This last sense is the one used in quarantine’s first appearance in English that is recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary and the Middle English Dictionary. From the description of Jerusalem in the Itineraries of William Wey, c. 1470, found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodl 565:
By yonde ys a wyldernys of quaren tyne,
Wher Cryst wyth fastyng hys body dyd pyne.(Beyond is a wilderness of quarantine,
Where Christ with fasting his body did pine.)
Quarantine’s connection with disease probably comes to us via Italian, specifically from Venice, where, in the early fourteenth century, ships from plague-ridden ports were required to ride at anchor for forty days before putting into the port. This sense appears in English by 1649, when the newspaper the Moderate Intelligencer published this report from Toulon:
Our Gallyes which were upon the point of finishing their Quarantaine, and entering into this Port, have been hindred from it by th'arrival of three others that were out a roaming.
In less than fifteen years, the word had lost its specific association with forty days, as recorded by Samuel Pepys in his Diary of 26 November 1663:
The plague, it seems, grows more and more at Amsterdam; and we are going upon making of all ships coming from thence and Hambrough, or any other infected places, to perform their Quarantine (for 30 days as Sir Rd. Browne expressed it in the order of the Council, contrary to the import of the word; though in the general acceptation, it signifies now the thing, not the time spent in doing it) in Holehaven, a thing never done by us before.
The verb to quarantine appears in the early nineteenth century.
In current use, quarantine is also used in politics to refer to a diplomatic or economic isolation of a country. This sense appears as early as 1891, when France severed diplomatic ties with Bulgaria, as reported by the New York Times on 16 December of that year:
The future will throw light on the question of how the rupture will affect Bulgaria and those in power at Sofia. When a great power establishes diplomatic quarantine against them it is well not to go too far on a course on which they appear to be embarking with a light heart.
More famously, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his “Quarantine Speech” on 5 October 1937 in which he advocated for strong but unspecified, presumably economic, action against unspecified aggressor nations, presumably Germany, Italy, and Japan. Roosevelt did not specifically label those actions as a quarantine, instead he used a medical metaphor:
It seems to be unfortunately true that the epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading. And mark this well: When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease. It is my determination to pursue a policy of peace and to adopt every practicable measure to avoid involvement in war.
As reported by the New York Times the following day:
Nobody at the State Department today professed to know what the President meant in his Chicago speech by suggesting an isolation of the world’s treaty-breakers by “quarantine,” or by his offer to join “positive efforts to preserve peace.”
On 22 October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, President John F. Kennedy used the word with more specificity in his announcement of a naval blockade of Cuba:
To halt this offensive buildup, a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated. All ships of any kind bound for Cuba from whatever nation or port will, if found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons, be turned back. This quarantine will be extended, if needed, to other types of cargo and carriers. We are not at this time, however, denying the necessities of life as the Soviets attempted to do in their Berlin blockade of 1948.
The word is also used in computing to refer to isolating a computer virus, as in this 21 March 1988 use in the journal InfoWorld:
Also included is Canary, a “quarantine” program for use as a sample to test for a virus by pairing it with new or suspect programs.
Sources:
Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. quarentena.
Middle English Dictionary, 2018, s.v. quarentine.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2007, s.v. quarantine, n. and quarantine, v.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “Quarantine and Isolation.”29 September 2017.
Photo credit: NASA.