HISTORY OF QUARANTINE

Moving beyond quarantine at the scale of the human body we will now begin to investigate spatial and architectural conditions of quarantine.

"The practice of quarantine—the separation of the diseased from the healthy—has been around a long time. As early as the writing of the Old Testament, for instance, rules existed for isolating lepers. It wasn't until the Black Death of the 14th century, however, that Venice established the first formal system of quarantine, requiring ships to lay at anchor for 40 days before landing. ("Quarantine" comes from the Latin for forty.) The Venetian model held sway until the discovery in the late 1800s that germs cause disease, after which health officials began tailoring quarantines with individual microbes in mind. In the mid-20th century, the advent of antibiotics and routine vaccinations made large-scale quarantines a thing of the past, but today bioterrorism and newly emergent diseases like SARS threaten to resurrect the age-old custom, potentially on the scale of entire cities. In this time line, follow the evolution of quarantine, from Roman times to the present."  -Peter Tyson

Here are a series of short PDF's that outline the history of Quarantine:
CDC_History of Quarantine
History of Quarantine_Timeline
Quarantine Stations Fact Sheet
Quarantine and Isolation