Disease

1. The Plague of Justinian Justinian I is often credited as the most influential Byzantine emperor, but his reign also coincided with one of the first well-documented outbreaks of plague. The pandemic is believed to have originated in Africa and then spread to Europe through ...read more

In the midst of a star-spangled summer in which the United States celebrated its bicentennial, more than 4,000 members of the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Legion gathered just blocks away from Independence Hall where the country’s forefathers had severed their ties with ...read more

In a study published last week in the journal Science, researchers from the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman at the European Academy of Bozen/Bolzano (EURAC) in Italy reported their discovery and analysis of the Helicobacter pylori, or H. pylori, microbes found inside the ...read more

Smallpox is believed to have first infected humans around the time of the earliest agricultural settlements some 12,000 years ago. No surviving evidence of it, however, predates the so-called New Kingdom of Egypt, which lasted from about 1570 B.C. to 1085 B.C. A few mummies from ...read more

Bound in leather and held in the collections of the British Library, the 10th-century volume known as “Bald’s Leechbook” is widely considered to be one of the world’s earliest medical textbooks. According to one of its recipes, a potion of garlic, onion or leek, wine and oxgall ...read more

1. Her real name was Mary Mallon. She was born on September 23, 1869, in Cookstown, a small village in the north of Ireland. Mallon’s hometown in County Tyrone was among one of Ireland’s poorest areas. 2. Only three confirmed deaths were linked to Typhoid Mary. Mallon was ...read more

In the new study, researchers from the University of Oslo analyzed climate data going back to the 14th century, looking for information about the weather conditions that coincided with outbreaks of the bubonic plague, or Black Death. Specifically, the scientists analyzed ...read more

Caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae (V. cholerae), the disease known as cholera invades the small intestine, causing severe diarrhea and dehydration; in the most extreme cases, it can kill its victims within hours. Beginning in the early 19th century, cholera spread from its ...read more

1. Although polio was the most feared disease of the 20th century, it was hardly the deadliest. “Polio was never the raging epidemic portrayed in the media, not even at its height in the 1940s and 1950s,” writes David M. Oshinsky in his Pulitzer Prize winning book “Polio: An ...read more

In the new study, a team of scientists from the University of Tubingen in Germany was able to extract tuberculosis DNA from three skeletons found in southern Peru. As reported by NPR, the remains were buried around 1,000 years ago, predating the arrival of Christopher Columbus ...read more

The funerary complex of Harwa and Akhimenru, located on the west bank of the ancient city of Thebes (modern-day Luxor), is one of the largest private burial monuments in Egypt. Built in the seventh century B.C. for a grand steward named Harwa, it was used continuously for burial ...read more

Though African sleeping sickness—formally known as human African trypanosomiasis—likely has been present in East Africa for many centuries, the first recorded descriptions of the disease date to the late 19th century, when European powers began their conquest and colonization of ...read more

After construction workers digging tunnels for the new Crossrail train line last year discovered some 25 skeletons buried under Charterhouse Square in the Clerkenwell area of London, scientists immediately suspected they had stumbled on a plague cemetery. The square, once home to ...read more

Michaela Binder, a PhD student at Britain’s Durham University, excavated the 3,200-year-old skeleton in 2013 at the Amara West archaeological site, located in northern Sudan on the left bank of the Nile River, some 465 miles downstream from the Sudanese capital, Khartoum. Buried ...read more

Viruses are tiny, infectious agents with both living and nonliving characteristics. They cannot multiply on their own, instead doing so in the cells of other organisms—from animals to plants to bacteria. No one knew anything about them until 1892, when Russian scientist Dmitri ...read more

For most of the past century, scientists and medical researchers have hotly debated the origins of the 1918 influenza outbreak. Although the pandemic had been dubbed the “Spanish flu,” it only appeared to hit harder in neutral Spain because the country was free from wartime ...read more

During his reign, which lasted from 527 to 565, Byzantine Emperor Justinian I initiated military campaigns in Italy, North Africa and elsewhere in an attempt to reconstruct the fallen Roman Empire. His efforts at territorial expansion suffered a major setback, however, when ...read more

Bubonic plague, caused by bacteria called Yersinia pestis, is usually transmitted to humans through bites from infected fleas carried aboard rodents, notably rats. The disease first emerged in China more than 2,600 years ago, and spread to Western Europe and Africa via the Silk ...read more