Laurie Garrett, American science journalist and author who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1996, has written extensively on global outbreaks (Ebola: Study of an Outbreak; HIV and National Security: Where are the Links?; I Heard the Sirens Scream: How Americans Responded to the 9/11 and Anthrax Attacks; Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health). In her landmark 1994 book, The Coming Plague, she forecast the great probability of the emergence and global spread of more contagious pathogens. For decades she has sounded the warning about the lack of strategic health policies around the world and been a strong advocate for the development of well-supported public health systems to avoid global catastrophes.
What happens when the next contagious threat to humans appears, depends on the policies put in place now to safeguard people around the world.
Description: Black stone amulet with an incantation against plague (800 BC-612 BC). It is inscribed with a quotation from the Akkadian epic of Erra.
Source: The Trustees of the British Museum
Description: The first known mention of the word "abracadabra" was in the second century AD in a book called Liber Medicinalis (sometimes known as De Medicina Praecepta Saluberrima) by the ancient Roman physician Serenus Sammonicus, who prescribed that malaria sufferers wear an amulet containing the word written in the form of a triangle.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
License: Public domain
Description: Fresco from the Lavaudieu Abbey, France, depicting Death (Anthropos ) killing with the plague.
Source: WorldImages database at California State University
License: Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.5)
Description: Copper engraving of Doctor Schnabel [i.e Dr. Beak], a plague doctor in seventeenth-century Rome, with a satirical macaronic poem in octosyllabic rhyming couplets.
Creator:Paul Fürst (publisher, and perhaps also the engraver)
Date: Circa 1656
Source: Wikimedia Commons
License: Public Domain
Description: Two men lifting a plague victim from the street into a cart, with a woman and child lying dead on the ground at their feet and a man carrying a woman along the street seen through an arch behind them to right. Etching and engraving.
Source: The Trustees of the British Museum
License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Description: Black and white poster. Visual image is a photograph of a Red Cross nurse with a gauze mask over her nose and mouth. Text next to the image provides tips to prevent influenza. Title above text. Publisher information at top of poster.
Publisher: New Haven, Conn. : Illustrated Current News
Extent: 1 poster : 32 x 48 cm
Source: U.S. National Library of Medicine Digital Collections
License: Public domain
Description: Street scene showing many people attending to plague victims.
Extent: 1 print : 23 x 17 cm
Source: U.S. National Library of Medicine Digital Collections
License: Public domain
Historical Pandemics
- Overview
- 165 AD: The Antonine Plague
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541-750 AD: The Justinianic Plague
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1347 and 1351 AD: Black Death
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1918-1919 AD: Spanish flu
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1981 AD-present: AIDS
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2019 AD-present: COVID-19
Videos
- NIH VideoCasting: National Institutes of Health (NIH) VideoCast broadcasts seminars, conferences and meetings live to a world-wide audience over the Internet as a real-time streaming video. Events are recorded and made available for viewers to watch at their convenience as an on-demand video or a downloadable podcast.
- Van Dyke, Willard and Ben Maddow, directors. The Silent War: Colombia's Fight against Yellow Fever. U.S. National Library of Medicine Digital Collections, National Institutes of Health.
Primary Sources
- Eighteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new window
A digitized collection of books, pamphlets, essays, broadsides, and more, issued 1701-1800. Most published in the U.K., some from the Americas and elsewhere. Significant collections of women writers of the eighteenth century, collections on the French Revolution, and numerous eighteenth-century editions of the works of Shakespeare are included. Where they add scholarly value or contain important differences, multiple editions of each individual work are offered.
