10 Quarantine Islands and Lazarettos

Before “public health” became a thing you could major in, it was a thing you could get stranded on.
For centuries, port cities wrestled with a brutal math problem: trade keeps you alive, but germs can
make you famously not alive. The compromise was the quarantine island (or its fancy Mediterranean cousin,
the lazaretto): an “almost close enough” place where ships, cargo, and people could wait out disease
incubation periodsaway from crowded streets and fresh water supplies.

These sites weren’t vacation islands (even if the views tried their best). They were infrastructure:
part hospital, part inspection station, part bureaucracy with a stethoscope. Some became models of modern
infectious-disease control. Others became cautionary tales about fear, stigma, and who gets treated like
a “risk” instead of a person.

What exactly is a lazaretto (and why do islands keep showing up)?

A lazaretto is a quarantine stationoften built for maritime travelwhere people or goods suspected
of carrying contagious disease were isolated and monitored. The island part isn’t just dramatic flair.
Water is nature’s security fence: it slows movement, limits contact, and makes it easier to control
who enters and exits. When your “PPE” is mostly common sense and your “testing lab” is one doctor
squinting very seriously, geography becomes a public health strategy.

Quarantine systems also came with routines that sound oddly modern: health inspections, paperwork proving
a ship was “clean,” separate facilities for sick vs. exposed-but-not-sick, disinfection of belongings,
and strict movement rules. The goal was always the same: buy time, break chains of transmission, and keep
outbreaks from landing in the city right along with the passengers.

10 quarantine islands and lazarettos that shaped public health history

1) Ellis Island Immigrant Hospital (New York Harbor)

Ellis Island is famous for immigration processing, but its medical side was just as important. The
immigrant hospital complex expanded in the early 1900s and included specialized wards, including an
infectious disease areabecause a busy harbor is basically an international group project for microbes.
People flagged during inspection could be isolated, treated, or held for observation, depending on
symptoms and suspected illness. It’s a reminder that U.S. immigration history isn’t only paperwork and
hope; it also includes public health screening, hospital care, and hard decisions made under pressure.

2) Angel Island Quarantine Station (San Francisco Bay, California)

On the West Coast, Angel Island functioned as a frontline defense for San Francisco. A quarantine station
opened at Ayala Cove in the late 19th century, where ships could be disinfected and passengers isolated
if disease was suspected. Accounts describe fumigation systems and procedures meant to keep highly
transmissible illnesses from reaching the city. Angel Island later became known for its immigration
station as well, meaning medical inspection and quarantine overlapped with migration policysometimes in
ways that reflected bias as much as biology.

3) Hoffman Island (New York City)

If New York Harbor had a “do not bring your germs past this point” sign, Hoffman Island helped post it.
Built as an artificial island and used for quarantine in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it housed
people (often immigrants) who were suspected of having contagious disease. The logic was blunt but
effective: keep possible cases out of the population center until they’re cleared. Today, its story is
also about how cities adapt to recurring health threatsyellow fever, cholera, smallpoxusing the tools
and knowledge they had at the time.

4) Swinburne Island (New York City)

Swinburne Island was closely linked to Hoffman Islandanother manmade “buffer zone” in the harbor.
Together they formed a quarantine system that functioned like a health checkpoint for the city. Swinburne
was sometimes referred to as the “Lower Quarantine,” and both islands served as isolation space when
ships arrived with suspected illness onboard. There’s a reason these places feel like they belong in a
novel: they were built for emergencies that arrived by sea, with little warning and huge consequences.

5) North Brother Island (New York City)

North Brother Island was home to Riverside Hospital, which treated and isolated people with quarantinable
diseases. It’s tied to one of the most famousand most complicatedquarantine stories in U.S. history:
Mary Mallon (“Typhoid Mary”), an asymptomatic carrier who was forcibly isolated there for years.
The island’s layered uses over time (hospital facilities, later restricted access and conservation) show
how quarantine sites can outlive their original purposeand how a place can hold both public safety
intentions and deep ethical controversy about rights, stigma, and due process.

6) Gallops Island (Boston Harbor, Massachusetts)

Boston used several harbor locations for quarantine over the centuries, and Gallops Island became a major
quarantine facility after the Civil War era. Its job was to screen and, when necessary, isolate people
arriving by shipespecially during periods when immigration and maritime trade surged. Historical records
describe large numbers of people processed through the facility, with hospital operations supporting the
port’s public health defenses. Gallops Island captures a practical truth: quarantine wasn’t only a
dramatic “plague island” storyit was day-to-day municipal logistics.

7) Ship Island National Quarantine Station (Mississippi)

Ship Island’s quarantine history reads like a case study in coastal public health. In the late 1800s,
the site became America’s first national quarantine station, protecting Gulf Coast ports by inspecting
crews and separating sick individuals from population centers. A marine hospital treated ill sailors
away from cities, aiming to prevent diseases such as yellow fever from spreading through busy trade
routes. The station eventually ceased active quarantine operations in the early 20th century, but its
existence shows how the federal government increasingly treated quarantine as national infrastructure,
not just local improvisation.

8) The Lazaretto at Essington (Tinicum Township, Pennsylvania)

Not every lazaretto is on a dramatic island surrounded by waves; sometimes it’s on a riverbank where
commerce flows like a current. The Lazaretto near Philadelphiaoften described as the oldest surviving
quarantine station in the United Stateswas built after devastating yellow fever epidemics. Incoming
ships stopped for health inspection, and passengers and cargo could be quarantined until cleared.
It’s a blueprint of early American public health: quarantine, inspection, and regulation of movement,
implemented with the urgency of a city that had learnedpainfullythat outbreaks can rewrite everything.

9) Lazzaretto Vecchio (Venice Lagoon, Italy)

Venice helped invent the lazaretto concept on a grand scale. Lazzaretto Vecchio is often described as one
of the earliest dedicated quarantine-and-treatment islands for plague victims. In a trading empire where
ships arrived from every direction, Venice needed systems that were more than prayers and luck. The
approach was organized: isolate the infected, separate them from the merely exposed, and manage the flow
of people and goods. The Venetian model influenced quarantine thinking for centuries, proving that public
health measures could be formal policynot just panic.

10) Lazzaretto Nuovo (Venice Lagoon, Italy)

If Lazzaretto Vecchio was about caring for the sick, Lazzaretto Nuovo became famous for quarantining the
exposed and disinfecting goods. For centuries it served as a key defensive layer against plague, with
cargo handled and treated while crews and travelers waited out isolation periods. It’s an early version
of what we’d now call risk separation: different rules for different levels of exposure, plus procedures
aimed at stopping transmission through objects as well as people. In modern terms, it was a logistics
hub designed to keep trade moving while reducing outbreak riskan ambitious balancing act.

Patterns you can’t unsee once you know what to look for

Quarantine wasn’t just medicineit was a system

Across these sites, a few themes repeat. First: quarantine is less a single act and more a workflow.
Inspect the ship. Separate the sick from the exposed. Document who’s cleared. Disinfect what can carry
infection. Enforce time-based waiting. Even when the science was incomplete, officials recognized that
time + distance could reduce transmission.

Geography did half the job

Islands simplified enforcement (and sometimes tempted authorities to overuse isolation because it was
“convenient”). When quarantine is built into landscapesharbors, coves, offshore sandbarsit becomes a
physical policy decision. That’s powerful, but it also raises questions: Who gets sent away? For how
long? Under what evidence? And who gets to decide?

The human cost was real

These places protected cities, but they also produced loneliness, stigma, and fear. Some quarantines were
medically necessary. Others reflected social anxiety, xenophobia, or moral judgment disguised as
“health.” History doesn’t let us pretend quarantine is automatically virtuous. It pushes us to ask how
to protect communities and preserve dignityespecially for people with the least power.

Experiences that bring quarantine history to life (and add the missing )

Reading about quarantine islands is one thing; imagining the lived experience is another. Picture arriving
after weeks at seasalt-cracked lips, stiff legs, and the kind of exhaustion that turns your brain into
a slow-loading webpage. You expect land to mean relief. Instead, an official pointsnot to the citybut
to a smaller shape in the water. “Not there. There.” The island is close enough to see the skyline, but
far enough that it might as well be another planet.

For many travelers, the first “welcome” to America (or to any major port city) wasn’t a parade; it was a
medical exam. A quick look at eyes and skin. Questions shouted over language barriers. Bags opened. Items
handled. Sometimes disinfected. Sometimes destroyed. In places like Angel Island and Ellis Island, these
routines blended public health with immigration control. The experience could feel like being judged by
a checklist you never got to read.

Quarantine islands also had a strange sensory identity. They were busy, but not lively. You might hear
the creak of docks, the slap of water against pilings, and the constant footstep rhythm of staff moving
between wards. The smell could shift by the hour: disinfectants, damp wood, cooking, laundry, salt air.
On a foggy morning, the whole facility could feel like it was floatingan in-between space where time
stretched out and certainty was rationed.

Then there’s the emotional geography: the way distance messes with your head. From Hoffman or Swinburne
you could be painfully close to New York City. From Boston’s harbor islands, the mainland sat right there,
doing normal-life thingswork, school, shoppingwhile you waited for clearance like a human “pending”
status. Quarantine turns the horizon into a taunt. It’s not isolation because you’re alone; it’s
isolation because you’re excluded.

Not every story is grim. There were also moments of care: nurses who learned names and routines; doctors
who treated patients as people, not problems; small kindnesses that helped families stay steady. In some
facilities, the very existence of organized careseparate wards, trained staff, medical observationwas a
step toward modern healthcare. Even when outcomes were limited by the era’s science, the intention to
reduce suffering mattered.

Visiting or studying these sites today can feel like stepping into an argument between past and present.
North Brother Island’s restricted access and conservation focus, the restored narratives around Ellis
Island, and the documented history of places like Ship Island or the Lazaretto in Pennsylvania all remind
us that quarantine is never just about pathogens. It’s about trust, fairness, and whether a society can
protect itself without turning fear into policy. The islands don’t give easy answersbut they do give a
clear message: public health choices leave footprints. Sometimes they’re on paper. Sometimes they’re on
stone. Sometimes they’re on an island you can see from shore.

Conclusion: quarantine islands are mirrors, not just museums

Quarantine islands and lazarettos sit at the crossroads of medicine, trade, migration, and law. They show
how communities tried to manage the unknown with the tools available: distance, time, inspection, and
organized care. They also show the risks of letting fear define “who belongs” and who gets isolated.
Studying these sites isn’t about nostalgia for strict rulesit’s about understanding how public health
systems evolve, and how to build responses that are effective and humane.