Quarantine, the prescribed time, generally 40 days (hence the name), of non-intercourse with the shore for a ship suspected of infection, latterly enforced, and that very strictly, in the cases of infection with yellow fever or plague; since November 1896, the system of quarantine as regards the British Islands has ceased to exist.
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Quakers * Quarles, Francis