The diagnosis: a skeletal doctor measures a patient’s pulse, L. Crusius / Wellcome Collection, Creative commons Texts that are hundreds of years old might yield clues to medical problems of the past. But without a body, a definitive diagnosis is rarely possible. And unless you know the context of what you’re reading, it’s possible to go[…]
From hunting rare bugs to harvesting the world’s most expensive plant parts, conservator Cheryl Porter will try almost anything to learn more about pigments from the past. These colours weren’t only used to illuminate manuscripts and paintings – they were also important medicines, and artists would often source the raw materials for their work from[…]
Books, music, artworks and memorials help ensure that victims of pandemics are remembered. But while the Black Death, AIDS and Ebola outbreaks are firmly part of our collective cultural memory, the Spanish flu outbreak has not been. Medical historian and author Mark Honigsbaum explains why. By Dr. Mark Honigsbaum / 10.25.2018 Lecturer in Medical History[…]
As Indians began to rebel against colonial rule, the British accused them of spreading cholera, little imagining who was really to blame. The terrors that confronted one colonist show how alarming the outbreak had become. By Anna Faherty / 06.06.2017 Associate Lecturer University of the Arts London India, 1857. In a British enclave, Katherine Bartrum watches her[…]
A healthy-seeming cook gained unwelcome notoriety as Typhoid Mary, unwittingly spreading disease to co-workers and employers. Ultimately, the New York authorities took extreme measures to protect the public. By Anna Faherty / 06.29.2017 Associate Lecturer University of the Arts London New York, 1907. Mary Mallon spreads infection, unaware that her name will one day become synonymous with[…]
A huge expansion of the population of New Orleans created the perfect environment for the spread of yellow fever, and recent immigrants were those that suffered most. Doctors put this down to their “loathsome” lifestyles, but science was eventually to find another culprit. By Anna Faherty / 06.15.2017 Associate Lecturer University of the Arts London[…]
Charming family scenes in Victorian adverts for children’s medicines were in stark contrast to some of the dangerous ingredients that the products contained. Alcohol and opiates were among the substances helping to ‘soothe’ the nation’s children. By Briony Hudson / 10.12.2017 Pharmacy Historian, Curator, Lecturer British Society for the History of Pharmacy When young Betsy[…]
The story of a flamboyant doctor whose famous fans included Dickens. But his experiments with hypnosis eventually met with establishment disapproval. By Wendy Moore / 04.23.2018 Journalist and Medical Historian We think of libraries as places of quiet solitude where information is reassuringly organised, ordered and catalogued. Yet for me one of the best things about[…]
Venus’s bathing. (Margate). Side way or any way., Thomas Rowlandson / Wellcome Collection, Creative Commons Fashionable seaside towns in England owe much of their popularity to the 18th-century doctors who advised their patients to take the ‘sea cure’. By Dr. Jane Darcy / 05.23.2018 Professor of Literature University College London Introduction How did the so-called ‘sea[…]
In the 1850s, smallpox vaccination became compulsory in Britain. But the influence of anti-vaccination campaigners meant outbreaks were still possible – as one teenage girl found out to her cost. By Anna Faherty / 07.20.2017 Associate Lecturer University of the Arts London Gloucester, 1896. Ethel Cromwell is taken ill at the height of Britain’s last great smallpox[…]
A combination of poverty and “plague orders” in 1665 trapped many in situations that meant almost certain infection and death. Weaver John New, like many confined with dying relatives, was denied the escape routes open to the rich. By Anna Faherty / 06.22.2017 Associate Lecturer University of the Arts London The City of London, 1665. As the[…]
Everett Historical / Shutterstock The 1918 pandemic became known as the “Spanish flu” or the “Spanish Lady.” By Rachel Withers / 10.25.2018 In 1918, an influenza pandemic swept the world, causing more deaths in a year than any event in human history—a rather broadly estimated 50 million to 100 million, or 3 to 6 percent of[…]
The fear of prostitution and female promiscuity peaked during World War I. By Laura Lammasniemi / 07.28.2016 Teaching Fellow, SOAS School of Law PhD Candidate, Birkbeck College, School of Law In 1918, the final year of the First World War, over 100 women were convicted for infecting a member of His Majesty’s (HM) armed forces with[…]
Aedes aegypti Diseases are entangled with the human-made world, and to reduce diseases to their nonhuman aspects is to risk naturalizing them in distorting ways. By Dr. Paul S. Sutter Professor of Environmental History University of Colorado Boulder In many environmental histories, diseases serve to make one of the field’s foundational claims: that nonhuman forces matter[…]
The Plague at Ashdod, by Nicolas Poussin / Louvre Museum, Wikimedia Commons The word influenza is derived from the medieval Italian word for “influence” (influentia) and referred to the perceived causes of the disease. By Jim Davis / 03.15.2017 PhD Candidate in History The Ohio State University You may not like getting your flu shot, but you[…]
A virus is essentially an information system (encoded in DNA or RNA) surrounded by a protective coat. Tom Thai/Flickr, Creative Commons Humans have a deep history of viral infections, the evidence for which dates back to ancient DNA from Egyptian mummies. By Dr. Peter C. Doherty / 04.26.2016 Laureate Professor The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity A virus[…]
An extinct strain of the human Hepatitis B virus (HBV) has been discovered in Bronze Age human skeletons found in burial sites across Europe and Asia. A pioneering study has identified the oldest evidence of HBV in the ancient remains and proved that viruses can become extinct. The scientific significance of the research has been[…]
A mass burial of battle victims from the Xiongnu period in Mongolia. The Xiongnu warriors are linked to the nomadic people who would later become known as the Huns. Photo: BBC News By Ivan Dikov / 05.11.2018 The Justinian Plague of 541 – 542 AD, which may have killed up to 25 million people, likely originated in Asia,[…]
How did Yersinia pestis bacteria start to target the lungs and become so deadly? National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, CC BY It’s a deadly bacterium that can spread like wildfire. New research suggests Yersinia pestisfirst developed its ability to cause lung infection and then evolved to be highly infectious. By Dr. Daniel Zimbler (left) and Dr. Wyndham Lathem (right) / 06.30.2015 Zimbler: Senior Scientist, Microbiology[…]
The earliest hominin cancer. Patrick Randolph-Quinney (University of Central Lancashire/University of the Witwatersrand) Cancer is not the modern disease many believe it to be. New fossil evidence from two South African caves suggests that its origins lie deep in prehistory. By Dr. Patrick Randolph-Quinney (left) and Dr. Edward John Odes (right) / 09.12.2016 Randolph-Quinney: Reader/Associate Professor in Biological and Forensic Anthropology, University of Central Lancashire Odes: Postdoctoral Researcher, Bone Pathology[…]
Teeth fossils with evidence of dental lesions from Australopithecus africanus. Ian Towle, Author provided Prehistoric humans and their predecessors may have had a very different diet but their teeth suffered in similar ways to ours. By Dr. Ian Towle / 03.01.2018 Sessional Lecturer in Anthropology Liverpool John Moores University Dental erosion is one of the most common tooth problems in the world today. Fizzy[…]
What will it take to finish polio off in the last three countries where it persists? AP Photo/B.K. Bangash The virus’ days look numbered – but health workers have their work cut out for them to eradicate the devastating disease once and for all. By Dr. Christine Crudo Blackburn and Dr. Morton Wendelbo / 03.23.2018[…]
A prisoner looks out a window on March 26, 2015, from Zhdanivskaya prison in Ukraine, were TB is rampant. AP Photo/Mstyslav Chernov World TB Day will be observed March 24, with the good news that deaths from tuberculosis are declining. But a trend toward confining those with TB threatens to stall advances. By Eric Friedman,[…]
Nurse B.K. Morris gives a flu shot to Winifred Quinn during a press event on the flu vaccine, Thursday, Sept. 17, 2015, at the National Press Club in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) By Dr. Nicole Iovine, M.D., PhD / 03.06.2018 Associate Professor, Infectious Diseases University of Florida Researchers believe that over 50 million people worldwide died in[…]
By (left-to-right) Dr. Gerardo Chowell, Dr. Cecile Viboud, and Dr. Lone Simonsen / 03.05.2018 Chowell: Professor of Mathematical Epidemiology, Georgia State University Viboud: Senior Research Scientist, National Institutes of Health Simonsen: Professor of Population Health Science, Roskilde University One hundred years ago, a novel pandemic influenza virus spread rapidly around the world. It killed about[…]
Children at a school in Antananarivo, Madagascar, during a plague outbreak, Oct. 3, 2017. AP Photo/Alexander Joe By David Markman / 02.26.2018 PhD Candidate in Biology (Biosecurity and Infectious Disease) Colorado State University Plague is a highly contagious disease that has killed millions of people over the past 1,400 years. Outbreaks still sporadically occur in as[…]
Trapped by the Cold War and scarred after a failed revolution, Hungary fought one of its greatest battles against polio. By Penny Bailey / 04.14.2014 Kisvárda, Hungary, 1954. The summer night was warm, the road outside deserted. No one drove any more unless they were secret police or favoured by the Party. Inside, Irén and[…]
Photo courtesy of PREDICT/Mike Cranfield Two ambitious projects aim to understand when and how the next human disease will emerge from wildlife, and what we can do to minimize harm when it does. By Karl Gruber / 12.07.2017 PhD Candidate in Biological Sciences University of Western Australia Earlier this month, the World Health Organization (WHO)[…]
Photo from Max Pixel By Dolly Stolze / 10.31.2017 For me, zombies are probably the scariest of the iconic horror monsters because humans are either zombie food fighting for survival in a post-apolocalypic landscape or they are transformed into mindless walking corpses that are doomed to feed on the bodies of other people. While these stumbling,[…]