It was the word "conquered" that I struggled with. I don't think you could say that that any epidemic was conquered until the coming of vaccines and certainly not the Black Death which periodically recurred for centuries and is still endemic in parts of Asia.
Certainly quarantine was used to try to prevent the spread of the plague but it was ineffective, witness the rapid spread along the the medieval trading routes.
Indeed quarantining shiploads of men and locking up entire households as was practised in the Black Death most likely did nothing to prevent the plague's spread and probably actually ncreased the death rate as being locked up with the vector, the BlacK Rat and its attendant fleas was effectively a death sentence.
Philip Ziegler's "The Black Death" is worth reading too.
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