If you got sick with a visible disease in 19th century San Francisco, you wouldn't be taken to a doctor or a hospital. You wouldn't be given chicken soup and penicillin. You'd be forcibly removed in a zinc-lined cop carriage to a set of nasty, claptrap, decrepit cottages in Potrero Hill known as the PESTHOUSE. And you guys thought Covid-19 quarantine was bad!

References

"Driven by Fear: Epidemics and Isolation in San Francisco's House of Pestilence," Gunter Risse

"[The Origin of the Word Quarantine](https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/the-origin-of-the-word-quarantine/#:~:text=But to find the origin,to mid-14th century Europe.)," Science Friday

"City of Plagues," Susan Craddock

"The Pest House," HLAS [including a map of the location]

The David Rumsey Map Collection

The Chinese Exclusion Act

Visiting Hawaii's Tragic and Remote Leprosy Colony

"The Sick Rose," Richard Barnett

"And the Band Played On," Randy Shilts

Ward 86 at San Francisco General Hospital

An 1896 etching from the San Francisco Call of the San Francisco Pesthouse Annex

San Francisco's pesthouse: Not a hospital!