Epidemics, quarantine and the political power of medicine

The spread of Covid 19 disease in early 2020, which quickly became a global epidemic, drastically changed human relationships. The use of quarantine technique to prevent the spread of the disease has sparked much controversy in the areas of public health and social control. It is necessary to be aware of these widespread changes and the resulting conflicts, to know the history of the epidemic and its effects in the field of public health and its consequences in changing the political pattern and social control. In this article, we first try to briefly describe the evolution of the concept of pandemics from Greece to the Middle Ages, and show that the dominant method of controlling pandemics was segregation. Then we show how in the fourteenth century the quarantine technique was invented to control epidemics. The invention of this technique was the beginning of the emergence of new knowledge such as statistics and social control. Finally, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, public health became a new object. In fact, urban medicine in the eighteenth century was the continuation and development of the medical-political institution of quarantine in the late Middle Ages, which included the study of places that spread the phenomena of epidemics. In other words, the public health program was introduced as a health regime for the population that required authoritarian medical interventions and controls. .