When Union Army general William Tecumseh Sherman famously said “War is hell,” he was referring to war in general, but he could have been describing trench warfare, a military tactic that’s been traced to the Civil War. Trenches—long, deep ditches dug as protective defenses—are ...read more
Rats have long been blamed for spreading the Black Death around Europe in the 14th century. Specifically, historians have speculated that the fleas on rats are responsible for the estimated 25 million plague deaths between 1347 and 1351. However, a new study suggests that rats ...read more
In 1545, an unknown disease struck the Aztec Empire. Those who came down with it might become feverish, start vomiting, and develop blotches on their skin. Most horrific of all, they’d bleed from their eyes, mouth, and nose, then die within a few days. Over the next five years, ...read more
In the 1980s and early 1990s, the outbreak of HIV and AIDS swept across the United States and rest of the world, though the disease originated decades earlier. Today, more than 70 million people have been infected with HIV and about 35 million have died from AIDS since the start ...read more
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
During the 18th and 19th centuries, in the swiftly industrializing countries of Europe and North America, tuberculosis–or the dreaded “consumption”–reached epic proportions. It was the leading cause of death among all age groups in the Western world until the early 20th century, ...read more
Ötzi the Tyrolean iceman died in middle age some 5,300 years ago, most likely after sustaining a head injury and taking an arrow to the shoulder. He reemerged from obscurity in September 1991, when two German tourists hiking through Italy’s Ötztal Alps wandered off the designated ...read more