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'Quarantine' comes from the Venetian quarantena, 'forty days'. In the late Middle Ages Venice made ships arriving from plague-hit ports wait forty days before anyone could come ashore, to see whether the disease broke out on board.

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The practice began a little earlier, with a shorter wait. In 1377 the Republic of Ragusa, today's Dubrovnik in Croatia, ordered newcomers from plague areas to spend 30 days in isolation, a trentino. Venice opened a permanent isolation hospital, a lazaretto, on an island in its lagoon in 1423, and the forty-day wait became the rule there; the Venetian Senate is usually said to have fixed it in 1448. No one knows for certain why forty was chosen. It may come from the Greek physician Hippocrates's ideas about acute illnesses, those that strike suddenly, or from the forty days Jesus spent in the desert. The word reached Ottoman Turkish from Venetian: karantina already appears in 1721, in the embassy report of Yirmisekiz Mehmed Çelebi, the Ottoman envoy to Paris.

Türkçe oku
Karantina sözcüğü, Venedik dilinde “kırk gün” anlamına gelen quarantena'dan gelir. Orta Çağ'ın sonlarında Venedik, veba görülen limanlardan gelen gemileri kırk gün açıkta bekletirdi; gemide hastalık çıkıp çıkmadığı anlaşılana kadar kimse karaya ayak basamazdı.

Uygulama aslında biraz daha önce, daha kısa bir bekleme süresiyle başladı. 1377'de Ragusa Cumhuriyeti, yani bugün Hırvatistan'daki Dubrovnik, veba görülen yerlerden gelenlerin 30 gün ayrı bir yerde kalmasını şart koştu. Venedik 1423'te lagünündeki bir adada lazaret denen kalıcı bir tecrit hastanesi açtı ve kırk günlük bekleme orada kural hâline geldi; Venedik Senatosu'nun bu süreyi 1448'de belirlediği söylenir. Neden kırk gün seçildiği kesin olarak bilinmiyor. Bu süre, Yunan hekim Hipokrat'ın akut, yani ani başlayan hastalıklar üzerine görüşlerinden ya da İsa'nın çölde geçirdiği kırk günden gelmiş olabilir. Sözcük Osmanlı Türkçesine Venedik dilinden geçti; “karantina” 1721'de, Paris'e elçi olarak giden Yirmisekiz Mehmed Çelebi'nin sefaretnamesinde geçer. Kırk gün beklemek Türk geleneğine de yabancı değildir: Doğumdan ya da ölümden sonra kırk günün dolmasına “kırkı çıkmak” denir.

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Background reading: Quarantine
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