Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: pneumonic plague

  • The Pearl of the Orient: the persistence of Dr. Wu Lien-teh

    Ku Ezriq Raif bin Ku BesryPerlis, Malaysia The work of Wu Lien-teh in controlling the 1910 Manchurian Plague has been celebrated as “a milestone in the systematic practice of epidemiological principles in disease control.” The cloth face mask he developed, “the principal means of personal protection”1 during the outbreak, was a significant contribution to the…

  • COVID-19 and the Black Death

    Colleen Donnelly Denver, Colorado, United States During the fourteenth century waves of the bubonic plague washed across Europe. Doomsday books of the age described an apocalypse that wiped out one-quarter to one-third of the population. Today, we are far better at tracking both the numbers of people impacted and the spread of disease, depending on the…

  • Plague Sydney 1900

    Barry R. CatchloveSydney Introduction Bubonic plague has been the most feared disease throughout history. Most people are aware of its ravages but see it as a pestilence of the middle ages. Few are aware that it remains a disease of the twenty-first century, is endemic in many parts of the developed and underdeveloped world, and…