epidemics

Quarantine at the Lazaretto met many migrants when they arrived in 19th-century Philadelphia.

Harm reduction strategies, like those pioneered by queer men of color, have the best chance of stopping this disease.

The world is still reeling from the pandemic, but another scourge we thought we’d eliminated has reemerged.

The story of a regional ruling class that struck a devil’s bargain with disease, going beyond negligence to cultivate semi-annual yellow fever epidemics.

The practice of vaccination in the U.S. cannot be divorced from the history of slavery.

A new book explores how immunity to the disease created opportunities for white, but not Black, people.

Shibutani, Haruo Najima, and Tomika Shibutani reported that the vaccination lines stretched as long as 200 yards. “The conditions were atrocious.”

A historian of global health explains how the lack of ICU beds in low-income communities is the result of government spending cuts dating back to the 1970s.

Counting both uninfected and infected people helps us better understand a pandemic.

Why do some political incumbents adopt aggressive measures to slow the spread of infectious diseases while others do not?

Enacting vaccination mandates demands political give and take.

Benjamin Franklin's writing about losing his son to smallpox is a must-read for parents weighing COVID-19 vaccines today.

June Holmes was in her late twenties, working as a social worker on Long Island, when she first heard about “this thing called AIDS.”

We have no historical precedent for this moment.

Vaccines against smallpox during the Revolutionary War are one example of how mandates have protected the health of Americans for more than two centuries.

Those who claim that vaccine resistance is an expression of liberty are historically illiterate.

Early Americans coped with disease through narratives that found divine providence and mercy in suffering.

Colonial America was divided over smallpox inoculation, but he championed science to skeptic.

Known as a master of horror, he also understood the power—and the limits—of science.

The smallpox epidemic of the 1860s offers us a valuable, if disconcerting, clue about how epidemics actually end.