Why Contagion Now?

The problem of contagion—in which diseases are communicated among people and populations—extends across all times, places, and cultures. The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the protean nature of contagion and its effects: illness, suffering, and death; strategies to address and reduce its impacts; and innovations in prevention and treatment. While focused on our current dilemma, the pandemic has also generated a wide recognition of the nature of contagion and the fundamental interactions between biology and society.... Read more about Introduction to the Project

Li Shizhen, Compendium of Materia Medica (Bencao gangmu 本草綱目), 25 vols. (ca. 1573–1593).

Library of Congress, Chinese Rare Book Collection.*

World Digital Library https://www.wdl.org/en/item/13551/... Read more about Tufuling / China Root: A Novel Cure for Syphilis and Mercurial Poisoning as Presented in Li Shizhen’s Compendium of Materia Medica

Girolamo Manfredi, Tractatus de peste ([Bologna: Henricus de Colonia, after December 31, 1479]

Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Rare Books Ballard 456

https://id.lib.harvard.edu/curiosity/contagion/36-990095627420203941... Read more about Girolamo Manfredi’s Plague Treatise: Individualized Cures and Prevention for the Masses and Elites

Miguel Muñoz, Método sencillo, claro y fácil de asistir a los niños en la actual epidemia de viruelas naturales (San Luis Potosí, Mexico: Ladislao Vildosola, 1830)

Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Rare Books RC183.55.M6 M93 1830

https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/contagion/catalog/36-990057593620203941... Read more about Ruminant Vaccines: A Guide to Surviving Smallpox During a National Emergency

John Winthrop, A lecture on earthquakes; Read in the Chapel of Harvard-College in Cambridge, N.E. November 26th 1755. On Occasion of the great earthquake which shook New-England the Week before (Boston: Printed and Sold by Edes & Gill, at their Printing-Office next to the Prison in Queen-Street, 1755)

Harvard University Archives, HUC 8755.295

https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:492898084$1i

... Read more about John Winthrop’s Lecture on Earthquakes (1755) and “Pestilential Distempers” Caused by Environmental Disruption

Lantern Slides of the Manchurian Pneumonic Plague, 1910–1911

Richard P. Strong Papers, 1911-2004 (inclusive), 1911-1945 (bulk).

Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine. GA 82.

http://id.lib.harvard.edu/alma/990006034200203941/catalog... Read more about Masks and Geopolitics in Richard Pearson Strong’s photos of the Manchurian Plague Epidemic, 1910—1911

Seventeenth-century Italian broadside, "BANDO PER CAUSA DI CONTAGGIO" (Reggio, 1676)

Harvard Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, uncatalogued
... Read more about Geographies of Plague: Public Health Relations and Epidemiological Divides in the Mediterranean

Patrick Russell, A Treatise of the Plague: Containing an Historical Journal and Medical Account of the Plague, at Aleppo, in the Years 1760, 1761, and 1762: Also, Remarks on Quarantines, Lazarettos, and the Administration of the Police in times of Pestilence: To Which Is Added, an Appendix, Containing Cases of the Plague and an Account of the Weather during the Pestilence Season (London: Printed for G.G. J. and J. Robinson, 1791)

Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Rare Books 1.Msp.1791.5

https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/contagion/catalog/36-990066390090203941... Read more about Networks of Information and Infection: Documenting the Plague in 18th-Century Aleppo

Susan Anna Brown, The Invalid’s Tea-tray (Boston: J.R. Osgood and Co., 1885)

Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, 22.N.296

https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/contagion/catalog/36-990022082380203941

... Read more about Sickroom Cookery and Disease

[Pestblatt] [Augsburg: s.n., ca. 1473]^[1]

Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, RC171 .P33 1473

https://id.lib.harvard.edu/curiosity/contagion/36-990096775200203941... Read more about Spiritual Solutions For Plague in a Late Medieval German Broadside

“Statice caroliniana [Limonium carolinianum] (Marsh Rosemary) original illustration (seq. 24),” Jacob Bigelow botanical illustrations, approximately 1813–1819. gra00002. Botany Libraries, Gray Herbarium Library, Harvard University.

https://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:FMUS.GRA:37638551?n=24... Read more about A Return to our Roots: Countering Epidemic Disease with Plant-Derived Medicine

Contagion project leads Hannah Marcus and Allan Brandt (Department of the History of Science, Harvard University) invite researchers to contribute commentaries for inclusion in this initiative.... Read more about Contribute to the Contagion Project

Alberto J. Pani, Hygiene in Mexico: A Study of Sanitary and Educational Problems (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917).

Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, 32.B.235

https://id.lib.harvard.edu/curiosity/contagion/36-990062540410203941... Read more about Health and Hygiene in Post-Revolutionary Mexico

Cato Sells, “Indian Babies: How to Keep Them Well” (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1916)

Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Rare Books, RJ61 .U7 1916

https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/contagion/catalog/36-990062651820203941... Read more about The Usefulness of Saving Babies: A Reflection on Materials From a 1916 Campaign to Prevent Indigenous Infant Death