Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them

by Jennifer Wright

In 1962 there was a laughing outbreak at a girls’ school in Tanzania. It

In a 1911 issue of American Magazine, Sir William Osler, M.D., addressed the people who refused to vaccinate against smallpox:

Wakefield was a fraud. In

The term mad hatters comes from the fact that nineteenth-century hat makers were often exposed to and indeed went mad from mercury

That said, typhoid fever is still prevalent in many periphery countries, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggests that if you’re in one of those locales you should “boil it (water), cook it (food), peel it (fruit), or forget it.”

Before long, they had begun singing a schoolyard rhyme that went: I had a little bird, Its name was Enza.

That October—which was the deadliest month in U.S. history, and that takes into account periods like, say, the Civil War—195,000 people died of the Spanish flu.

So the disease is still out there, perhaps lurking under the ice somewhere, and there’s no cure. If there’s another outbreak, mankind might not be so lucky as to survive.

They kept cutting until she became incoherent.7 After the operation she was unable to walk or talk.

“You could never talk about a successful lobotomy. You might as well talk about a successful automobile accident.”22

“The patient was … held down on the floor while Freeman administered the shock.

Vaccines in general act like training wheels for your immune system.

For some comparison, if this sort of thing interests you, there is a smaller trace amount of formaldehyde in a vaccine than you would find in an apple. (A vaccine contains at most 0.1 milligrams, while your average apple contains 6

Killed virus vaccines tend to provide a shorter period of immunity than live virus vaccines, which means, at least at first, that they require booster shots every few years.