The story of the New York Marine Hospital in Staten Island—known simply as “the Quarantine,” seems very timely. It was the firey center of what became known as the Staten Island Quarantine War of 1858. At the time it was the largest quarantine facility in the United States.
The idea to isolate the sick and contagious from the general population to limit the spread of disease may date back thousands of years. The word quarantine is from the 14th-century Venetian word quarantena, meaning “forty days,” the period that all ships were required to be isolated before passengers and crew could go ashore during the Black Death plague epidemic.
From 1795 to 1798, yellow fever killed thousands in New York City. In reaction, the New York City Common Council passed a quarantine law funding the creation of the New York Marine Hospital. The Marine Hospital, which became known as the Quarantine, was established on Staten Island in the former town of Castleton, overlooking Upper New York Bay. Sailors arriving by ship who showed signs of illness were taken to the hospital and the crew on the affected ships would be quarantined.
Staten Island residents were not happy about the Quarantine. When the population of New York City numbered around 50,000, there were only about 5,000 Staten Island residents. (Staten Island was not yet part of New York City.) The Quarantine had the capacity to house 1,500 patients. At its peak in the 1840s, the Quarantine treated more than 8,000 patients each year. If the Quarantine was an attempt to avoid contagion in New York, Staten Islanders saw it as posing a very real threat of spreading disease to their island.
After considerable protest and agitation, local residents took direct action and burned down the Quarantine, including the hospital and twenty supporting buildings, on the nights of September 1 and 2, 1858. Remarkably no one died as a result of the fires.
With immigration rising New York still needed a quarantine station. Building another on Staten Island seemed a bad choice, in the early 1870s, the federal government constructed two artificial islands in the city’s Lower Bay as a home for a new quarantine station serving the Port of New York. They built Hoffman Island and Swinburne Islands for the purpose.
Here is a video by the History Guy with more background on the 1858 Staten Island Quarantine War.
I think your dates are a little off.
The Black Death was a devastating global epidemic of bubonic plague that struck Europe and Asia in the mid-1300s. The plague arrived in Europe in October 1347, when 12 ships from the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina. People gathered on the docks were met with a horrifying surprise: Most sailors aboard the ships were dead, and those still alive were gravely ill and covered in black boils that oozed blood and pus. Sicilian authorities hastily ordered the fleet of “death ships” out of the harbor, but it was too late: Over the next five years, the Black Death would kill more than 20 million people in Europe—almost one-third of the continent’s population.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.history.com/.amp/topics/middle-ages/black-death
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