Think cold-and-flu-season is treating you badly? Check this out.

I haven’t posted in the past few days because the plague descended on my home.  Well actually, it was just a respiratory virus. Still, it gave me fodder for today’s entry: a brief rundown on a compilation of material describing what ailed mankind. That collection, one of the highlights of Harvard University’s Open Collections program, is titled Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics.

 That digital collection is focused around nine significant episodes of contagious disease.  Those outbreaks span the centuries, from the pestilence of the late 15^th century, to the North American Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918. According to the collection’s website, Contagion features digitized copies of books, serials, pamphlets, incunabula, and manuscripts—a total of more than 500,000 pages.  Many of those textual items also feature visual materials, such as plates, engravings, maps, charts, broadsides, and other illustrations. The collection also includes two unique sets of visual materials from the Center for the History of Medicine at Harvard’s Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine.

The image above is part of that collection and shows the title page of A Narrative of the Method and Success of Inoculating the Small-Pox in New England, 1722.  That work is from the holdings of Houghton Library at Harvard.

The Pandemic of 1918-1919

One of the websites I visit most every day is HISTORY.COM’s This Day in History. Perusing that site this morning, I learned that on this day in 1918 a parade in Philadelphia drew crowds to the city and helped spread the influenza virus throughout the region. The pandemic of 1918-1919 sickened people around the globe. When it was over, some 30 million people worldwide had perished after contracting the highly contagious virus.

The National Archives has put together and impressive array of digitized documents in their online collection, The Deadly Virus: The Influenza Epidemic of 1918. There, you’ll find photographs, telegrams, letters, and government documents. Additionally, The United States Department of Health and Human Services had compiled a rich collection of digital resources related to the outbreak titled The Great Pandemic: The United States in 1918-1919. Like the National Archives collection, it contains photographs, letters, and other documents.

The photo above of a New York City letter carrier was taken in October of 1918 and comes from the National Archives.