Pandemics

Cholera tore through New York City in the summer of 1832, leaving its victims with sunken eyes, blue skin, severe diarrhea, nausea and vomiting. It had swept from its origin in Asia and then made its way across Europe before arriving at New York’s shores. It only took a matter of ...read more

The Silk Road, a network of land and sea trade routes that connected China and the Far East with Europe from 130 B.C. to 1453 A.D., became a vital source for everything from fabric and leather goods to spices and precious stones. It connected communities and allowed them to share ...read more

In the fall of 1918, the United States was approaching a midterm election like none other before. Not only were President Woodrow Wilson and his fellow Democrats trying to keep control of Congress during the home stretch of World War I—they were trying to do so in the middle of ...read more

When the influenza pandemic hit the U.S. between 1918 and 1920, Americans wanted answers. Their questions weren’t limited to what caused the pandemic or might prevent the next one. They struggled with more eternal concerns, such as what happens to us after we die and whether it’s ...read more

Nearly 700 years after the Black Death swept through Europe, it still haunts the world as the worst-case scenario for an epidemic. Called the Great Mortality as it caused its devastation, this second great pandemic of Bubonic Plague became known as the Black Death in the late ...read more

At the onset of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, store shelves were quickly emptied of toilet paper, revealing the commodity’s prominent, yet unspoken role in modern-day society. Although humans have cleaned their bottoms for as long as they have walked the Earth, “three-ply” and ...read more

Lashed by a squall of historical events over four harrowing years, exhausted Americans longed to catch their collective breath as Election Day approached. The four years leading up to the presidential election of 1920 had delivered a ghastly confluence of war, pestilence, ...read more

Throughout millennia, people have fostered some pretty irrational ideas about how infectious diseases such as plague and cholera were spread. Some of those notions—like the idea that the ancient Cyprian plague could be caught simply by staring into the face of someone ...read more

The plague ravaged large cities and provincial towns in northern and central Italy from 1629 to 1631, killing more than 45,000 people in Venice alone and wiping out more than half the population of cities like Parma and Verona. But strikingly, some communities were spared. In ...read more

For millennia, a diagnosis of leprosy meant a life sentence of social isolation. People afflicted with the condition now known as Hansen’s disease—a bacterial infection that ravages the skin and nerves and can cause painful deformities—were typically ripped from their families, ...read more

In 1934, a doctor at a private boy’s school in Pennsylvania tried a unique method to stave off a potentially deadly measles outbreak. Dr. J. Roswell Gallagher extracted blood serum from a student who had recently recovered from a serious measles infection and began injecting the ...read more

Almost 700 years ago, the overwhelmed physicians and health officials fighting a devastating outbreak of bubonic plague in medieval Italy had no notion of viruses or bacteria, but they understood enough about the Black Death to implement some of the world’s first anti-contagion ...read more

In 1665 and 1666, one city experienced two enormous tragedies: the Great Plague of London and the Great Fire of London. The plague killed roughly 15 to 20 percent of the city’s population, while the fire burned about a quarter of London’s metropolis, making around 100,000 people ...read more

From America’s vantage in 1889, the Russian influenza posed little cause for concern. So what if it had struck with a vengeance in the Russian capital of St. Petersburg that fall, infecting as much as half the population? Or that it had raged swiftly westward across Europe, into ...read more

When a natural disaster, pandemic, war or of other crisis strikes, Americans have reacted with acts of kindness, turning both regular civilians and notables into heroes. According to Rebecca Solnit, author of A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in ...read more

On April 17, 1957, Maurice Hilleman realized a pandemic was on its way to the United States. That day, The New York Times reported on a large influenza outbreak in Hong Kong. One detail in particular caught the doctor’s eye: in the long waiting lines for clinics, the paper said ...read more

As human civilizations flourished, so did infectious disease. Large numbers of people living in close proximity to each other and to animals, often with poor sanitation and nutrition, provided fertile breeding grounds for disease. And new overseas trading routes spread the novel ...read more

In the late summer of 1918, the devastating second wave of the Spanish flu arrived on America’s shores. Carried by World War I doughboys returning home from Europe, the newly virulent virus spread first from Boston to New York and Philadelphia before traveling West to infect ...read more