[War & Business] The Origin of Cohort Isolation

The scene of 'Napoleon Visiting the Plague-Stricken in Jaffa,' painted by Antoine-Jean Gros, the court painter of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1804. [Image source= Louvre Museum official website]

[Asia Economy Reporter Hyunwoo Lee] Recently, along with the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) crisis, the term 'cohort isolation' has frequently appeared in the news. Here, 'cohort' originally referred to a military unit of about 500 soldiers in the ancient Roman Empire. It comes from the custom of isolating and managing infected soldiers in one barrack when an infectious disease spread within the army.

Until the 19th century, cohort isolation meant not just isolation but effectively discarding the lives of sick soldiers like worthless objects. At the slightest sign of infectious disease symptoms, all soldiers were gathered in one barrack and often killed en masse without hesitation. Napoleon, known as the greatest military commander in Europe at the time, was infamous for his brutal cohort isolation, with more soldiers reportedly dying from cohort isolation than in battle.

During Napoleon's Egyptian campaign in 1798, when the plague spread, he sacrificed cohort-isolated soldiers by abandoning them in the desert or setting fire to the barracks. When the spread did not subside, he promised to return for the soldiers a year later and returned to France with his top officials. Thousands of remaining soldiers endured the plague, hunger, and guerrilla tactics of the enemy while waiting for the return ship, but the ship never came until they were all wiped out. To prevent the plague from spreading to France, the soldiers were cohort-isolated in the middle of the Middle Eastern desert.

Later, in 1804, after becoming emperor, Napoleon spread false rumors that he had risked his life to personally visit the plague-ridden cohort isolation barracks during the Egyptian campaign. He had court painters depict the visit as propaganda tools. One of the masterpieces housed in the Louvre Museum in Paris, Antoine-Jean Gros's painting "Napoleon Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa," was created in this way.

The grim reality of cohort isolation, which had been hidden behind the heroic praises since ancient times, was first exposed outside the barracks during the Crimean War in 1853. This massive international war, the first after the invention of the camera, was the first war where the battlefield situation, previously known only to bureaucrats through official gazettes and confidential reports, was brutally exposed to the public. The establishment of Nightingale's nursing corps, known as the angels in white, and the founding of the Red Cross were all thanks to the horrific images of cohort isolation captured by cameras.

What was thought to be a story only seen in modern military history is now unfolding exactly the same way in Korean nursing hospitals in the 21st century. Just last month, nearly 100 lives were lost waiting for beds to be transferred from cohort-isolated nursing hospitals. Despite the public eye being everywhere now?not only cameras but also social networking services (SNS)?the government seems busier promoting the K-quarantine, which it boasts as a global model.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.