While identifying a new disease by its place of origin seems intuitive, history shows that doing so can have serious consequences for the people that live there.
Camp beds set up for travelers returning to Germany from China, who will be isolated for two weeks to make sure they don’t have coronavirus.
YANN SCHREIBER/AFP via Getty Images
Even before people understood how germs spread disease, they tried to isolate the sick to keep them from infecting others.
Physician letting blood from a patient. Attributed to Aldobrandino of Siena: Li Livres dou Santé. France, late 13th Century.
British Library, London, UK
A handful of manuscripts remain which give researchers valuable insights into medieval science.
Vibration devices have been used to treat everything from ‘hysteria’ to hair loss. So Marie Kondo’s tuning forks and crystals are nothing new.
from www.shutterstock.com
We’ve known how to control typhoid for over 100 years. The rapid current increase of drug-resistant variants in both rich and poor countries is down to decades of short-sighted global health policies.
A rabid dog’s bite can make a person seem to have animal characteristics.
Taras Verkhovynets/Shutterstock.com
Fear of a disease that seemed to turn people into beasts might have inspired belief in supernatural beings that live on in today’s creepy Halloween costumes.
As early as the 1860s the twin diseases of modernity – overwork and sleeplessness – became the focus of cultural anxieties.
Apothecaries of the 17th and 18th centuries diagnosed illness, mixed up medicine and dispensed it, a far cry from the current turf war between doctors and pharmacists.
Cam Miller/Flickr
The ‘turf war’ between doctors and pharmacists we see in current debates has a long history.
International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985, is one example of doctors’ involvement on the political stage.
Wellcome Images/Wikimedia Commons
Hernán Cortés owed his conquest of the Aztecs to his expedition’s unknown, unseen secret weapon: the smallpox virus. Disease epidemics can set the course of human history.
Laura Sumrall, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Reports of demonic possession are once again on the rise. But during the devil’s last apogee in early modern Europe, demonic afflictions were taken seriously by both priests and physicians.