September 5, 2026
Essay
Project SUNSHINE’s Supply of Human Bones
How Project SUNSHINE built a supply of human bones to measure radioactive fallout, and what its correspondence reveals about the people and institutions behind the samples.
Topic hub
Historical Epidemiology
Essays on epidemics as historical forces: ancient pathogens, colonial encounters, disease ecology, and the long memory of public health.
Essays
24 linked piece(s)
This hub groups related writing so readers can move from one argument to the surrounding disease history, ecology, and evidence.
July 26, 2026
Essay
Before the Odyssey, Apollo Sent a Plague
The Iliad, a Hittite mortality-crisis, and the limits of diagnosing ancient diseases
July 19, 2026
Essay
The Group Prohibition Helped Most: What Prohibition did for the unborn before pregnancy came with an alcohol warning
The Prohibition of alcohol in early 20th century American history became the policy everyone knows failed.
July 11, 2026
Essay
Were the Dark Ages Really Dark? What Rome’s Collapse Made Harder to See
Across much of the West, thinner supply systems and weaker administration made bad years harder to survive.
June 28, 2026
Essay
The Public Health Evidence on Policing Is Stranger Than Either Side Admits
Policing is not one exposure. Homicide prevention, traffic stops, arrests, and police violence need separate causal accounting.
June 21, 2026
Essay
What Did Your Job Do to Your Body?
Occupational disease starts with a boring question that can change the whole diagnosis.
June 6, 2026
Essay
The Flesh-Eating Fly America Thought It Had Beaten Is Back
The U.S. spent decades pushing New World screwworm south. Now the old livestock nightmare is moving back into view.
May 25, 2026
Essay
The Ordinary Deaths of the Vikings
The saga version is raids and swords. The burial evidence points to infection, injury, childhood death, and ordinary premodern risk.
April 25, 2026
Essay
Ancient DNA and Disease Selection in West Eurasia
How ancient DNA, infectious disease pressure, immunity, and changing environments help explain genomic selection in West Eurasian populations.
April 11, 2026
Essay
Big Epidemiology: Disease at the Scale of Civilization
What happens when you stop treating disease as background and start treating it as one of history's operating forces.
April 4, 2026
Essay
1793 Philadelphia Yellow Fever: America’s First Epidemic Crisis
The 1793 Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic as an early American public-health crisis shaped by urban ecology, politics, race, and mosquito-borne disease.
April 1, 2026
Essay
Did Vikings Spread Plague Across the North Sea?
A careful look at Viking movement, North Sea disease ecology, plague evidence, Norse voyages, and the limits of reconstructing medieval pathogen spread.
January 18, 2026
Essay
Plague, Steppe Migrations, and the Diseases Written Into European DNA
Ancient DNA lets us ask what migration, livestock, plague, and immune trade-offs left behind.
December 30, 2025
Essay
Cocoliztli: Mexico’s 16th-Century Mystery Epidemic
Cocoliztli and Mexico’s sixteenth-century mystery epidemics, including retrospective diagnosis, colonial records, ancient DNA, and pathogen uncertainty.
December 24, 2025
Essay
Inherited Infections: What Our Oldest Diseases Reveal About Human Prehistory
Ancient pathogens killed people, but they also left clues about migration, settlement, immunity, and the disease history carried in bodies.
December 3, 2025
Essay
When Did Syphilis Enter Europe? The Origins Debate
Everyone wants a clean origin story. The bones, genomes, and old chronicles keep refusing to give one.
November 19, 2025
Essay
Ancient Hookworm in the Americas
Ancient hookworm in the Americas, parasite geography, archaeology, migration, and why a tropical helminth complicates disease-history origin stories.
November 12, 2025
Essay
The Ghosts of Meals Past: What We've Learned from Fossilized Poop
It is fossilized poop, yes. It is also one of the better archives we have for diet, parasites, and ordinary life.
November 4, 2025
Essay
Oldest Diseases in the Fossil Record
A deep-time disease essay on the oldest known evidence for infection, cancer, parasites, and what paleopathology can reveal.
October 28, 2025
Essay
Humanity's Deadliest Companions: Checking the Till on the Deadliest Microbes in History
Ranking history's deadliest microbes sounds simple until the denominator, timescale, diagnosis, and archives start fighting back.
October 22, 2025
Essay
Islands of Affliction: Leprosy and Empire in the South Pacific
Isolation was never just medical. It was stigma, empire, surveillance, exile, and disease control forced onto islands.
October 14, 2025
Essay
The Night Staten Island Burned Its Hospital: Fear, Fire, and the Forgotten Quarantine War of 1858
In 1858, quarantine policy met local panic, and Staten Island answered with fire.
September 11, 2025
Essay
Body-Snatching, the Doctors' Riot, and How Cadavers Built American Medicine
Anatomy needed bodies. Poverty, graveyards, the law, and medical ambition decided whose bodies were taken.
July 5, 2025
Essay
The Poison Nobody Could Agree On
One French town got sick in 1951, and the diagnosis has been argued over ever since.