Science

When overwhelmed unemployment insurance systems malfunctioned, governments blamed the 60-year-old programming language COBOL. But what really failed?

Mark Twain was a prankster, but his belief in telepathy was real enough that he worried about unintentional telepathic plagiarism.

This syllabus lays groundwork for making questions of race and racism central to studying the histories of medicine and science.

What if there is a vaccine, but not everyone gets it? Exploring the lessons of the polio vaccine's shortcomings as we address a new public health crisis today.

And the lone forecaster who predicted its deadly path.

Having a species named after you is an honor. Not everyone deserves it.

What the long history of the autonomous vehicle reveals about its fast-approaching future.

The diseases that prove best suited to global expansion are those that best exploit humans' global networks and behaviors in a given age.

Government investment into a cancer vaccine had drawbacks.

A public uprising forced Boston to prioritize fighting smallpox over the economy in 1792.

Thinking about our future, we look back on the aftermath of a century-old pandemic.

Disease has never been merely a biological phenomenon. Instead, all illnesses—including COVID-19—are social problems for humans to solve.

Before antibiotics, a scratch or blister could lead to death. Who knew this all could change with a little mold?

Politics, public health and a pandemic. What we didn’t learn from HIV.

We’re capturing the mundane as well as the memorable.

Like the museum behind it, the monument was designed in large part to train white people in a fundamentally racist way of seeing.

The role of almanacs in nineteenth-century popular medicine.

Research into the long-term consequences of a polio outbreak found that older students are at highest risk for harm.

How a friendship between a straight psychology professor and her gay student busted the myth of homosexuality as an illness.

Social Darwinism from AIDS to Covid-19.

Female nurses served their country domestically and abroad by caring for soliders striken by the influenza pandemic.

Before feminists rebranded them as sex toys, vibrators were just another medical device.

Illuminating a path forward.

Influenza pandemic of 1918 in the United States.

To be black and conscious of anti-black racism is to stare into the mirror of your own extinction.

Extending the narrative of Philadelphia's epidemic past 1793 yields lessons that are more complex and less comforting than the story that's often told.

In discussions about facial-recognition software, phrenology analogies seem like a no-brainer. In fact, they’re a dead-end.

COVID-19 isn’t an automatic death sentence, but the fear, vilification and isolation are the same.

Three new books consider the life, and impact, of Franz Boas, the "father of American cultural anthropology."

For hundreds of years, false theories of “innate difference and deficit in black bodies” have shaped American responses to disease.