Throughout Europe, police, soldiers and medical officials enforced quarantines. The rich locked themselves in relatively clean houses or in isolated country retreats.
In the US, yellow fever and cholera outbreaks in the late 1800s spurred the federal government to tighten control over quarantines that had been left mainly to local authorities.
In Indiana, a smallpox outbreak in 1893 led to the quarantine of many infected citizens, kept under home detention. Entire neighborhoods were sealed by armed guards; violators were put in prison.
Probably no one personifies the unwilling quarantine subject more than Mary Mallon, an Irish immigrant cook known as Typhoid Mary, who was banished for 26 years to a cabin on New York's North River Island.
Suspected of having infected nearly 50 people, three of whom died, she denied until her death in 1938 that she had carried typhoid fever.
Quarantines also grew out of a need to isolate leprosy, now known as Hansen's disease.
About 8,000 people were exiled to the tiny Hawaiian island of Molokai until a law was repealed in 1969 that forced people with leprosy or anyone suspected of having it to be secluded on land that was set apart.
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