Designer: PrimarySourceLearning.org staff

Disease

Understanding Goal

Interaction leads to cooperation and conflict.

Investigative Question

How do responses to disease change over time?

One of the invariable results of human interaction is the spread of diseases.  Over time, humans have responded to disease outbreaks through a variety of means.  In every instance since time immemorial, existing medical knowledge, the ways of understanding the causes, nature, and future of a disease, has limited the ability of humans to respond to these infectious spreads.  How and why human populations respond in the ways they do to disease outbreaks thus reveals much about the culture of that population, as well as the state of medical knowledge at a specific moment in history.

1. Patent medicine label
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/tri151.html


In nineteenth century America, the growth of advertising helped expand the nascent medical industries.  Especially successful for a time were those businesses offering "cure-alls" for a variety of diseases, disorders, and conditions for which scientists and businessmen alike were creating new medicines.

2. Images of hysterics under hypnosis at Salpetriere
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/freud/freud02.html#36a

Sigmund Freud was a pioneer psychiatrist whose experiments created modern psychoanalysis.  Seen here is a photograph of one of Freud's patients in a state of hysteria, one of the conditions which Freud used as a basis for explorations into neurology.  Freud's studies and conclusions paved the way for modern psychiatric and psychological techniques that would facilitate the growth of psychiatry and psychology as viable disciplines and powerful social institutions.

3. Planned housing fights disease.

http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3b48908
In the early twentieth century America, many in society viewed inner cities as bastions of disease.  Indeed, the dilapidated and filthy tenement housing which held many city residents facilitated the spread of diseases and impeded the ability of medical authorities and individual citizens to respond effectively to outbreaks.  Many progressive-era reformers targeted the structures of the city - its housing, its zoning policies, its environmental makeup - as part of the problem to effectively fighting disease.  This WPA poster shows one method for improvement - using planned housing.

4. Portrait of a superspreader: spread of SARS from the Metropole Hotel in Hong Kong as of 28 March 2003 / DI Cartography Center.

Modern computer technology has enabled human populations to more accurately detail the origins and spread of diseases. For instance, this map details the growth of the SARS disease from its inception point in a Hong Kong hotel. 

5. [Winter Count, 1230-1907]
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/trm054.html

The introduction of European diseases into the New World decimated Native populations. Small pox was one of the leading causes of death.  This Native American pictographic chart identifies significant events which took place over many past generations. Included alongside movement of animals, severe winter storms, and major famines are small pox epidemics, a weapon for which the Native Americans had little defense.