"The deadly outbreak of plague known as the Great Mortality, which struck Europe in the mid 1300s and raged for four centuries, wiped out more than 25 million people in the course of just two years. With its vicious onslaught, life changed for millions of people almost instantaneously. Deadly pandemics have always been a part of life, from the Great Mortality of the Middle Ages, to the Spanish Influenza outbreak of 1918, to the eruption of COVID-19...

Before AIDS or Ebola, there was the Spanish Flu - Catharine Arnold's gripping narrative, Pandemic 1918, marks the 100th anniversary of an epidemic that altered world history. In January 1918, as World War I raged on, a new and terrifying virus began to spread across the globe. In three successive waves, from 1918 to 1919, influenza killed more than 50 million people. German soldiers termed it Blitzkatarrh , British soldiers referred to it as Flanders...

After the unprecedented events of the COVID-19 pandemic, it may be hard to imagine a time not so long ago when deadly diseases were a routine part of life. It is harder still to fathom that the best medical thinking at that time blamed these diseases on noxious miasmas, bodily humors, and divine dyspepsia. This all began to change on a day in April 1676, when a little-known Dutch merchant described bacteria for the first time. Beginning on that day...

In 1793 Philadelphia, sixteen-year-old Matilda Cook, separated from her sick mother, learns about perseverance and self-reliance when she is forced to cope with the horrors of a yellow fever epidemic.

Plague and pestilence have both fascinated and terrified humanity from the very beginning. Societies and individuals have struggled to make sense of them, and more importantly they've often struggled to avoid them. Before the scientific age, people had no knowledge of the microbiological agents — unseen bacteria and viruses — which afflicted them, and thus the maladies were often ascribed to wrathful supernatural forces. Even when advances in...

Publisher Annotation: One hundred years ago, in September 1918, three things came to Boston: war, plague, and the World Series. In the tradition of Erick Larsen's bestselling Devil in the White City, September 1918 is a haunting three-dimensional recreation of a moment in history almost too cinematic to be real. 320pp., 10K

After years of living with mysterious symoptoms, a young girl from Brooklyn and a Duke University scientist are diagnosed with a disease said not to exist: Chronic Lyme disease. The Quiet Epidemic follows their search for answers, which lands them in the middle of a vicious medical debate. What begins as a patient story becomes an investigation into the history of Lyme disease. A paper trail of suppressed scientific research reveals why this tick-borne...

"On the 100th anniversary of the devastating pandemic of 1918, Jeremy Brown, a veteran ER doctor, explores the troubling, terrifying, and complex history of the flu virus, from the origins of the Great Flu that killed millions, to vexing questions such as: are we prepared for the next epidemic, should you get a flu shot, and how close are we to finding a cure? While influenza is now often thought of as a common and mild disease, it still kills over...

Epidemics: Filmed in the UK, Australia and the USA, Prague and Italy, this episode takes up the theme that , ironically, epidemics are the results of so-called progress and that despite medical technology, we are still vulnerable to old and new diseases that can change the course of history...In 1980 a woman in Lake Tahoe, California, died of pneumonic plague. She ran a creche that looked after 150 children. Her cat had caught it from a chipmunk and...