The news today is increasingly filled with speculation regarding methods to control the spread of a new influenza outbreak. In the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, when regional and international trade depended almost entirely on shipping across seas and oceans, disease was easily spread through port communities where ships would dock and unload their cargo. One solution to this danger was to establish quarantine by holding the crews of infected ships, against their will, in a complex of buildings called a lazaretto. These were typically isolated facilities originally built to house lepers - "lazzaro" meaning leper in Italian. Venice was one of the first nations to establish a quarantine of 40 days at the House of St. Lazarus in 1448.

John Howard was an English activist, born in 1726, who spent much of his life fighting for reforms to the inhumane conditions in English and European prisons. After achieving a great deal of success in these endeavors, he turned his attention to halting the spread of plague. His research included obtaining passage on a ship bound for Venice that had already been granted a foul bill of health, and was then attacked by pirates. After arriving in Venice, Howard was confined at the Venetian lazaretto, which gave him the first-hand experience of quarantine he had been searching for. Upon his return he toured British lazarettos and finally published An Account of the Principle Lazarettos in Europe in 1789. The work is similar to his earlier publications on prison reform, for lazarettos shared many of the deficiencies of jails, and the book contains many views and plans of both actual and proposed lazarettos. Howard's research methods (personal experience) were productive for the book, but ultimately proved fatal when he succumed to camp fever while traveling to Constantinople in 1790. He is still remembered today for his passionate defense of the rights of prison and lazaretto inmates.

The Ebling Library Copy (WZ 260 H849A 1789)

Our copy of Howard's book has a detached front cover and several loose pages, but still contains all of the engravings of maps, diagrams, and views illustrating the state of the lazaretto in the late eighteenth century. Included at the back is a sheet entitled "Directions to the Bookbinder" which details the manner in which the engravings are to be bound in with the loose pages of text. The Special Collections department at UW-Madison's Memorial Library also owns a copy of this work.

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