HistorID
HistorID is a home for short historical teaching briefs on outbreaks, organisms, antibiotics, vaccines, and the people who changed Infectious Diseases.
Featured Brief
In 1885, Pasteur's rabies vaccine turned prevention after exposure into a race against incubation time.
A 9-year-old boy arrived after a brutal dog attack at a time when rabies was almost a death sentence. Pasteur decided to move before the virus did.
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1885
In 1885, Pasteur's rabies vaccine turned prevention after exposure into a race against incubation time.
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1990s-2000s
Linezolid mattered because it was not just another antibiotic. It arrived as the first oxazolidinone used clinically against major resistant gram-positive pathogens.
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1976-1977
In 1976, a lethal pneumonia outbreak at a Philadelphia hotel revealed a bacterium hiding in modern water systems.
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1960s
The formalin-inactivated RSV vaccine of the 1960s became one of the most important cautionary stories in modern vaccinology.
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1943-1948
In 1943, a soil organism from a Rutgers lab yielded streptomycin, the first antibiotic that could strike tuberculosis directly.
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1928-1945
Penicillin mattered in 1928, but war is what turned it from a laboratory curiosity into a drug that could be made at scale.
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1904-1914
The Panama Canal is usually told as an engineering triumph, but yellow fever and malaria had to be beaten first.
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1885
In 1885, Daniel Alcides Carrion inoculated himself to prove that Oroya fever and verruga peruana were two phases of the same disease.
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1854
John Snow's cholera work did not end cholera in London overnight, but it changed how disease could be investigated.
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1800s
In the 19th century, tuberculosis was not just feared. In some circles it was aestheticized, romanticized, and woven into ideals of beauty and artistic sensitivity.
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1776-1777
George Washington's decision to inoculate Continental troops against smallpox may have been one of the most important medical orders of the Revolution.
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1520s
Old World epidemics likely destabilized the Inca world before many Spaniards ever entered its political center.
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1490s onward
Syphilis spread through Europe with so much fear and blame that nearly every nation tried to make it someone else's disease.
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1300s onward
Plague did not just kill. It changed how cities thought about movement, delay, and quarantine.
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