Quarantine facilities spread across the Mediterranean as a way to slow the spread of bubonic plague, and we've lived with quarantine in various forms ever since. The earliest recorded formal quarantine was in 1377, when the city of Dubrovnik mandated that those arriving from plague hotspots must first spend a month in a designated quarantine outpost. "The space and time you need to see whether it will emerge is quarantine." "here might be something dangerous inside you - something contagious - on the verge of breaking free," the authors write. Simply put, quarantine has always been an answer to the problem of doubt. "Quarantine restrictions, we came to realize, lie at the root of most global institutions and frameworks, preserved like a fly in bureaucratic amber," they write. That might sound freakishly prescient, but Manaugh and Twilley make the case that disease and the quarantines they inspire have in fact shaped much of the modern world, from international borders to passports to trade and agriculture. Until Proven Safe is not a hastily assembled response to the events of the past year and a half, but the result of many years of research. Even if it felt chaotic and unprecedented to those of us who had not lived through it before, quarantine is in fact "one of humanity's oldest and most consistent responses to epidemic disease," the authors write. So there is something counterintuitively comforting in a deeply-considered book that contextualizes and justifies the seclusion and uncertainty of the past 18 months. Which of the warring impulses - relief or fear, celebration or lingering grief - should we give in to? Should we be dancing, or mourning, or both? It's hard to imagine what closure might look like. Who wants to remain, even intellectually, in that claustrophobic place in which we slunk and mouldered our way through 20?īut there's something that feels impossible, too, about leaving it behind, despite the call of shot girl summers and the advent of the UK's absurdly named "Freedom Day." Life appears increasingly normal for the vaccinated, but death and sickness continues to tear through the unvaccinated world. I picked up Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine, by journalists Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley, with a degree of dread. Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine, by Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley
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