Quarantine: Then and Now

by Sean Doherty

For all of the handwringing about the unprecedented conditions wrought by COVID-19, it is important to recognize that before the advent of modern medicine disease and death were a constant in the lives of our forebears. With more varied pathogens, and with more frequency, isolated epidemics routinely morphed into pandemics. We can gain an understanding of the historic regularity with which scourges emerged in Rhode Island from an 1881 survey article penned by Dr. David King, Redwood Library President during the years 1849-59 and one-time head of the Rhode Island Medical Society. He notes that outbreaks of small pox had arisen in 1743, 1752, and 1776; of yellow fever in 1793; and of cholera in 1832, 1849, and 1866.1 King was of course well placed to understand this history and the mechanics to defend public health since his father—also Dr. David King, and himself President of the Library (1830-1836)—had lived through and fought many epidemics. King Sr. is credited with the state’s first vaccination, along with the first treatment of a patient with yellow fever, as well as being the lead figure who extinguished the 1793 epidemic in Newport.

It is during King Sr.’s presidency of the Redwood, in 1832, that emerged the cholera pandemic that the document pictured below addressed (Fig. 1), a fascinating period artifact recently purchased on eBay for the Redwood Special Collections. It is a printed circular issued by the Newport Board of Health sent to all surrounding Rhode Island municipalities—this one on July 7th, 1832 to the health authorities in Warwick. The advisory aimed to caution against the cholera already prevalent in New York and to warn of the possibility of it appearing in Rhode Island, and also to assert the quarantine policies put in place to protect Newport. Newporters were already by that time aware of the danger, as the Newport Mercury had tracked the outbreak across the globe for over a year previous. First reported on 23 September 1830 as it ravaged Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, the epidemic had spread to Moscow within a month.2 In 1831 it reached into the heart of Europe, devastating Munich, London, and Paris.3 According to the modern historical study by G. F. Pyle, the cholera had then diffused outwards from the port city of Montreal and Quebec, spread down the Lawrence River and “continued until it reached Lake Champlain in the United States. However, in many instances the original point of departure was New York City.” 4 In an age when many contagious diseases, and notably cholera, were endemic, Rhode Island laws and legislation safeguarding public health—and the authority to enforce them—had been enacted from early on. The general assembly in Newport passed the first law, entitled an “Act to Prevent the Spreading of Infectious Sickness,” in 1711. Over time, a body of dedicated legislation accrued from which was adapted extensions to answer whichever infectious disease prevailed at a given moment. During the 1832 cholera outbreak, Newport’s City Council enacted the 1822 law,

Figure 1. A fascinating period artifact recently purchased on eBay for the Redwood Special Collections. It is a printed circular issued by the Newport Board of Health sent to all surrounding Rhode Island municipalities—this one on July 7th, 1832 to the health authorities in Warwick.

And the episode gives us a whole new perspective on the severity of mandates when we consider the New York Evening Post’s report that in addition to the quarantine measures and penalty of a $300 fine for unlawful disembarkation, Newport “drew a cordon of militia around the city” who were “authorized to keep off the Cholera Morbus with gun and bayonet.”

Figure 2. Newport Board of Health cholera circular (1832), cover. Sent to Warwick Board of Health, July 7, 1832.

which sanctioned the election of a Board of Health, whose duties, powers and authority during a crisis superseded those of the town council itself. The Board “ha[d] a right to exercise by law, during the period for which they shall be the said town-council, …appointed for the preservation of health of the inhabitants.” 5 Accordingly, it was empowered “to carry into effect rules and regulations respecting quarantine, as to them that may appear necessary, to prevent the introduction of contagious or infectious diseases from other places.”6 Newport ordered quarantine regulations to take effect on 3 July 1832 in response to New York’s choleric cluster, and a few days later our document was printed and sent to Warwick, with other identical ones distributed across the state. One might first note the stated avowal of the need for a solidary response: “The Board [is] aware, that [the following resolutions] will be of no purpose without the Boards of Health in the different towns in this state, and Massachussets, act in concert.” Among the declarations was that all incoming vessels quarantine on the east side of Rose Island, until ordered otherwise, and “that no person or persons be permitted to land from any…vessel…without permission from [the] Board.”7 And the episode gives us a whole new perspective on the severity of mandates when we consider the New York Evening Post’s report that in addition to the quarantine measures and penalty of a $300 fine for unlawful disembarkation, Newport “drew a cordon of militia around the city” who were “authorized to keep off the Cholera Morbus with gun and bayonet.”8

In the end, the measures were only somewhat successful, as evidenced by a letter from Dr. William Turner of Newport to Dr. John Warren of Boston published in the Newport Mercury and reprinted in The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal. Turner wrote that passengers contracted cholera even as they were among those who remained on board while anchored near Rose Island. When they disembarked one week after quarantine, they became ill and died.9

1 David King, “State of Rhode Island” National Board of Health Bulletin 3 No. 11, 1881. 79. 2 Newport Mercury, 25 December 1830. 3 Newport Mercury, 14 January, 13 August 1831, 4 G. F. Pyle, “The Diffusion of Cholera in the United States in the Nineteenth

Century,” Geographical Analysis 1969, 61. 5 The Public Laws of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (Providence: Miller & Hutchens, 1822), Section 10, 263. 6 The Public Laws of the State of Rhode Island, Section 2, 261. 7 Newport Board of Health, Circular, Health Office, Newport R. I. July 4th 1832 To the Boards of Health, in the States of Rhode-Island and Massachusetts, B. B. Howland,

Newport Rhode Island: 1832. 8 New York Evening Post, 9 July 1832. 9 William Turner, “Cholera at Newport” The Boston Medical and

Surgical Journal Vol. VII No. 2, August 22 1832, 26.

Sean Doherty is the Reference Librarian at the Newport Public Library, Newport, Rhode Island