Plagues & Cures
History's deadliest outbreaks and the medicine that answered them
The Black Death Hits Florence: How a City of 100,000 Buried Half Its People
The Black Death killed roughly half of Florence in 1348. Boccaccio watched it happen, then turned the horror into the Decameron.
Bleeding the Patient: Two Thousand Years of Bloodletting and the Four Humors
George Washington's doctors bled him four times in his final hours, following two thousand years of medical theory built on the four humors.
John Snow and the Broad Street Pump: The Map That Ended a Cholera Epidemic
In 1854 Soho, a doctor ignored miasma theory, mapped cholera deaths by hand, and traced an epidemic to one water pump. Epidemiology was born.
Inside the Plague Doctor Costume: Why 17th Century Physicians Wore Bird Masks
A French court physician's fix for 'miasma' produced the beaked mask, waxed coat, and cane behind medicine's most costumed image.
The Radium Girls: The Factory Workers Who Glowed in the Dark and Paid for It
Young women hand-painted radium onto watch dials, pointing their brushes with their lips. Their employer knew the danger and let them die anyway.
The Parade That Killed Philadelphia: The 1918 Liberty Loan Disaster
Philadelphia marched 200,000 people down Broad Street in September 1918 against flu warnings, then became one of the deadliest cities of the pandemic.