Lethal Illness: A Historical Perspective

As you can see from the above title-page, debates over governments’ responses to outbreaks of deadly, contagious illnesses are nothing new. The image above comes from a work published during the Great Plague of London in and is the digital archive Contagion: Historical View of Diseases and Epidemic. That archive, part of Harvard University’s Open Collections Program, features material relating to a variety of lethal sicknesses, from the pestilence of the late 15^th Century to the Spanish Influence Epidemic of 1918-1919.