infectious diseases

<p>The causes of the cholera epidemic of 1832 were wholly incomprehensible to the people of the time.</p>

<p><span class="deck">Why did people fall mortally ill wherever she worked? Typhoid Mary was not about to help the inspector find out</span></p>

<p><span class="deck"><span class="typestyle">American medicine in a crucial era was at once surprisingly similar and shockingly different from what we know today. You could get aspirin at the drugstore, and anesthesia during surgery. But you could also buy opium over the counter, and the surgery would be more likely to be performed in your kitchen than in a hospital.</span> </span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Mary Mallon could do one thing very well, and all she wanted was to be left to it.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">The emergence of AIDS has added new urgency to the work of an organization that turns eighty this year</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Polio’s legacy to those who survived it includes uncommon stamina and courage and one grim new joke.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Sylvester Graham’s preposterous theories about food and health inadvertently created the American diet-fad industry.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">A murderous disease was ravaging the south in 1914. Then one brave and determined doctor discovered the cure — and nobody believed him.</span></p>

<p>During George Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one-tent of  Philadelphians, which was the capital of the young United States.</p>

<p>Toward the end of World War I, American doctors fought an invisible enemy on the home front — a pandemic that would kill more people than any other outbreak of disease in human history.</p>