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An artistic syringe with RNA sequence in it

The Tangled History of mRNA Vaccines

Hundreds of scientists had worked on mRNA vaccines for decades before the coronavirus pandemic brought a breakthrough.
Engraving of the stowage plans of the slave ship Brooks, 1814.

How Transatlantic Slave Trade Shaped Epidemiology Today

Slave ships and colonial plantations created environments that enabled doctors to study how diseases spread.
Moscow COVID-19 vaccination center
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The U.S. and Russia Could Join Forces to Get People Vaccinated. They Did Before.

The forgotten history of Soviet-American vaccine diplomacy.
Illustration of 1844 Philadelphia riots

When Philadelphia Became a Battlefield, Its Surgeons Bore Witness

The surgeons’ observations survive thanks to a remarkable document: an eleven-page published report presented to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.
A man sitting in a chair

Making Medical History: The Sociologist Who Helped Legalize Birth Control

When professor Norman E. Himes published The Medical History of Contraception in 1936, he had made a tactical move, to legalize birth control.
Pedestrians wearing protective masks walk past diners eating outdoors in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood last month.
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Revisiting a 19th Century Medical Idea Could Help Address Covid-19

When germ theory displaced the idea of "miasmas" we lost important knowledge about tackling airborne disease.
A comic overview of vaccine development production trials to deliveries.

The Last Time a Vaccine Saved America

Sixty-six years ago, people celebrated the polio vaccine by embracing in the streets. Our vaccine story is both more extraordinary and more complicated.
Pills in a week organizer.
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Drug Companies Keep Merging. Why That’s Bad For Consumers and Innovation.

Over 30 years, dramatic consolidation has meant higher prices, fewer treatment options and less incentive to innovate.
Nurse Harriet Curley takes the pulse of a patient at Sage Memorial Hospital on the Navajo Indian reservation in 1949. (AP)

How Native Americans Were Vaccinated Against Smallpox, Then Pushed Off Their Land

Nearly two centuries later, many tribes remain suspicious of the drive to get them vaccinated against the coronavirus.

Stop Blaming Tuskegee, Critics Say. It's Not An 'Excuse' for Current Medical Racism

It's the health inequities of today, not the infamous "Tuskegee Study," that explain many Black people's distrust of the American health system.
profile illustration of human nervous system against black background

The Mystery of ‘Harriet Cole’

Whose body was harvested to create a spectacular anatomical specimen, and did that person know they would be on display more than a century later?
Illustration of James McCune Smith, the African Free School #2, and the University of Glasgow

America's First Black Physician Sought to Heal a Nation's Persistent Illness

An activist, writer, doctor and intellectual, James McCune Smith, born enslaved, directed his talents to the eradication of slavery.
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We’re Catching More Diseases From Wild Animals, and It’s Our Fault.

Scientists explain how viruses, like Covid-19, spill over from animals to people, and what we must do to stop the next pandemic.
The Pfizer headquarters sign.
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Years of Medical Abuse Make Black Americans Less Likely to Trust the Coronavirus Vaccine

Reckoning with our past is crucial to getting buy-in for the vaccine.
Donald Trump speaking at an Operation Warp Speed vaccine summit
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If Nations Compete For Doses of Coronavirus Vaccines, We’ll All Lose

Pandemics can only be contained through organized collaboration and cooperative diplomacy.
Engraving of a vaccinated child.

An Eradication: Empire, Enslaved Children, and the Whitewashing of Vaccine History

Enslaved children were used in medical trials for early smallpox vaccines. They have been forgotten.
Doctor helping a patient

Trump’s Doctor Comes From a Uniquely American Brand of Medicine

Osteopathy was founded by a 19th-century healer who believed the body was a self-healing machine.

Grapefruit Is One of the Weirdest Fruits on the Planet

From its name, to its hazy origins, to its drug interactions, there's a lot going on beneath that thick rind.
Image of a Black man wearing a black mask saying "I Can't Breathe"

A History of Anti-Black Racism In Medicine

This syllabus lays groundwork for making questions of race and racism central to studying the histories of medicine and science.
A graphic depicting covid-19 with a plane on top of it.

Emerging Diseases, Re-Emerging Histories

The diseases that prove best suited to global expansion are those that best exploit humans' global networks and behaviors in a given age.
Person getting a vaccination.
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A Coronavirus Vaccine Can’t Come at the Expense of Fighting the Virus Now

Government investment into a cancer vaccine had drawbacks.
A painting of two people

Dispatches from 1918

Thinking about our future, we look back on the aftermath of a century-old pandemic.
A photograph of researcher Andrew Moyer in a USDA lab, looking at lab flasks.

Penicillin: How a Miracle Drug Changed the Fight Against Infection During World War II

Before antibiotics, a scratch or blister could lead to death. Who knew this all could change with a little mold?
A doctor treating an AIDS patient
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What the Bungled Response to HIV Can Teach Us About Dealing With Covid-19

Politics, public health and a pandemic. What we didn’t learn from HIV.

Patients and Patience: The Long Career of Yellow Fever

Extending the narrative of Philadelphia's epidemic past 1793 yields lessons that are more complex and less comforting than the story that's often told.

How Racism Is Shaping the Coronavirus Pandemic

For hundreds of years, false theories of “innate difference and deficit in black bodies” have shaped American responses to disease.

Why Humanity Will Probably Botch the Next Pandemic, Too

A conversation with Mike Davis about what must be done to combat the COVID-19 pandemic – and all the other monsters still to come.

Don’t Look For Patient Zeros

Naming the first people to fall sick often leads to abuse.

America's Devastating First Plague and the Birth of Epidemiology

In the 1790s a plague struck the new American nation and killed thousands. Noah Webster told the story of pandemics and invented a field.
Engraving of Reverend Cotton Mather, 1721, surrounded by a crowd.

The Slave Who Helped Boston Battle Smallpox

Like so many black scientists past, the African who brought inoculation to the American colonies never got his due.

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