Pandemic science in Renaissance Sardinia (Zaria Gorvett, BBC Future)

Pandemic science in Renaissance Sardinia: astute practices from the 16th century. From the article: 

It was the dead of night in mid-November 1582. A sailor stepped onto the dock at the port of Alghero, Sardinia, and took in the view of the city for the last time. The unfortunate mariner is thought to have arrived from Marseille, 447km (278 miles) across the Mediterranean Sea. The plague had been raging there for a year – and it seems that he had brought it with him….

At this point, many of the people of Alghero were already doomed. Based on official records from the time, one 18th-Century historian estimated that the epidemic led to 6,000 deaths, leaving only 150 people alive. In reality, it’s thought that the epidemic killed 60% of the city’s population….

It could have been worse, however. The surrounding districts were largely spared – unusually, the contagion remained in Alghero and vanished within eight months. It’s thought this was all down to one man and his prescient conception of social distancing….

Alghero itself was not well-set-up for an epidemic. The city was burdened with poorly organised sanitary systems, a handful of badly-trained medics and a “backwards” medical culture. It had its work cut out.

Enter Quinto Tiberio Angelerio, a 50-something doctor – Protomedicus – from the upper classes. He had trained abroad, because there were no universities at the time in Sardinia. Luckily for the residents of Alghero, he was fresh from Sicily, which had endured a plague epidemic of its own in 1575….

Alghero’s patient zero arrived with buboes and, later, two women died with distinctive bruises on their bodies – another feature of the disease. Angelerio knew immediately what was happening. His first instinct was to ask for permission to quarantine the patients, but he was thwarted again and again – first by indecisive magistrates, then by a senate which rejected his report and put his concerns down to apocalyptic visions.

Angelerio became desperate. “He had the courage or the guts to turn to the viceroy,” says [Ole] Benedictow [emeritus professor of history at the University of Oslo]. With their agreement, he set up a triple sanitary cordon around the city walls, to prevent any trading with people outside.

Initially, the measures were extremely unpopular, and the public wanted to lynch him. But as more people died, they came round – and he was fully entrusted with the task of containing the outbreak. Years later, he published a booklet, Ectypa Pestilentis Status Algheriae Sardiniae, detailing the 57 rules he had imposed upon the city. Here’s what he did.

First, citizens were advised not to leave their houses, or move from one to another. Along these lines, Angelerio also forbade all meetings, dances and entertainments – and stipulated that only one person per household should leave to do the shopping, a rule that should be familiar to many enduring pandemic restrictions today….