For the average person, what are some key takeaways from your book?
One would be the way that elite, national politicians were forced to go along with the procedures that bureaucrats in port cities developed. All these members of the boards of health had developed their rituals and traditions of disinfection, and, sure, there were government ministers who thought quarantine was ridiculous and over the top. More than 90% of ships being quarantined came from cities with no reports of disease and had no disease on board. But because boards of health had built such tight links with each other and could always point to the threat of retaliatory quarantine, politicians who wanted to relax procedures were brought on board.
Another takeaway people might find interesting is how much some of these disinfection procedures and ideas from another era resemble beliefs we continue to hold. This is a period before germ theory, and diseases were understood to be spread in various ways: Advocates of quarantine suggested there was some nebulous contaminating substance called ‘contagion,’ but opponents of this idea stressed causes that were more atmospheric and environmental.
Some of the procedures that happened during nineteenth-century quarantine are still being used today. Alcohol, vinegar, and chlorine were some favorite disinfecting substances both then and now. And even though we think we’ve moved way beyond ideas that some ‘miasma’ in the atmosphere can make you sick, you still see traces of environmentalist medical ideas too. Lots of people say, for example, that swamps are unhealthy—and not just because they breed mosquitoes—that being inside with really intense air conditioning and then going out into hot weather can give you the flu. Or your parents might tell you: ‘Don’t go outside with wet hair, you’ll get sick.’ We still have understandings of disease, contagion, and contamination that go well beyond the science of bacteria and viruses.
And a final major takeaway that really resonates with the present is the dramatically different way people of different classes experienced quarantine in the period I write about. If you were rich, and the people who published travel narratives about quarantine generally were quite wealthy, the whole thing often sounds unexpectedly great. ‘Oh, it might be a little bit sinister, but I managed to catch up in a lot of reading, and the food was wonderful.’
The vast majority of people quarantined, though, were sailors, soldiers, and fishermen who had to move back and forth across the Mediterranean. These people were crammed into tiny rooms, and they had to stay there for weeks. This would have been almost unbearable, and you get glimpses of it even in accounts written by very rich people. One such traveler, for example, who could pay for private lodging at a quarantine station at the Austrian frontier, casually mentioned seeing a crowd of 300 peasants crossing from the Ottoman Empire who couldn’t afford to rent any kind of shelter and had to camp outside in freezing weather for 10 days while wearing clothes that had been ‘fumigated’ by dipping them in cold water.