Late Middle Ages · Europe · Science
1396
Ludovico Trevisan records Dalmatian plague
1396
Ragusa, soon to be Dubrovnik, enforced a quarantine of thirty days, then forty, on incoming ships suspected of carrying disease. The word 'quarantine' derives from quaranta, forty. By the end of the century, coastal Italian and Dalmatian towns had institutionalized public health measures that remained the backbone of epidemic response for centuries.