Hello to the historians here.
A question had surfaced in my mind due to a certain global event in which we are all participants, and that is, has a quarantine on a large scale (at least city wide) ever been imposed by any population before, and has it worked?
In the cluttered and dusty corners of the memories of my misspent youth, I remembered reading that the bubonic plague in 14th century Europe only really ended after so many had died that the survivors locked themselves in their homes, refusing to get out, effectively enacting an organic form of quarantine.
The question I have for the subreddit is whether a) I have got it wrong - that in fact, quarantine did not end the black death.
And b) were there any other plagues in European history that were so bad that might have had people shutting themselves in?
Thank you!
As for OP's question part #A, it is true that the quarantine policy was indeed implemented by the authority in a few places like Milan during the Black Death, as explained by /u/AlviseFalier in Is it true that Milan was relatively unscathed by the Black Death? How, as a major center of trade, were they able to manage this? Did they take any pro-active steps to spare the city?, but it rather belonged to the exceptions at least in the middle of the 14th century. The likewise well-known quarantine policy across the Mediterranean ports seemed to be introduced gradually (at least as it appeared in the extant source) in course of the end of the 14th and 15th centuries, rather than as a direct countermeasure against [the first outbreak of] the Black Death itself (Tognotti 2013).
......You might have already noticed my phrasing of 'the first outbreak of' above. As I explained in The Black Death an estimated 75-200 million between 1347-51. After such a high death toll in such a short space of time, what caused the plague to suddenly end?, in a sense, it did not end as a one very big but temporary outbreak in the history. As its predecessors (as a first pandemic of the plague), the plague of the Justinian apparently did (also see my previous post on Bede's Plague of the Britons), smaller successive waves of the plague outbreak also repeatedly hit Western Europe at least more than a century (Cohn 2007), possibly further flowing into the Early Modern period (18th century).
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