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Ebola Battlers Can Learn From Venice’s Response To Black Death
Patients “driven to frenzy by the disease, especially at night … went here and there, colliding with one another and suddenly falling to the ground dead.”
No, it’s not a scene from the modern-day Ebola outbreak. It’s a description from Venice of a hospital ward during the plague that first struck the city in the mid-1300s.
The city fathers didn’t understand what they were up against. And that’s precisely why Venice’s response to the plague crisis serves as a model for modern cities and nations facing unpredictable threats. That’s the perspective of several experts on risk management who write on Venice’s response in the latest issue of the journalEnvironment Systems and Decisions
Venice, as an international trade center, was especially vulnerable to the Black Death. And it was especially innovative in devising responses to the disease.
Venice established what’s often considered to be the first quarantine hospital, or lazaretto, in 1432. (The word quarantine derives from the Italian for “forty,” as in forty days of isolation.) The lazaretto sat on an island in the Venetian Lagoon and was “so big that from afar it resembles a castle,” according to an observer. It could seem, as another writer put it, like “hell itself,” with “groans and sighs … without ceasing,” not to mention “foul odors [and] clouds of smoke from the burning of corpses.”
Photo: Venetians celebrate during the Festa del Redentore in Venice. The festival began in 1576 when the Republic’s Senate voted to build a church on the Giudecca Island to Christ the Redeemer to thank God for the city’s deliverance from the Plague. (Marco Di Lauro/Getty Images)
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