Significant Dates: 1494–1948

Specific disease episodes covered in the Contagion collection are highlighted in italics.

	1494	*“Syphilis, 1494–1923”*
	1514	Pierre Brissot revives the teaching of Hippocratic medicine.
	1543	Andreas Vesalius publishes De Fabrica Corporis Humani, which revolutionizes medicine.
	1546	Girolamo Fracastoro proposes that epidemic diseases are caused by transferable, seed-like entities.
	1563	Garcia de Orta founds the field of tropical medicine with his treatise on Indian diseases and treatments.
	1596	Li Shizhen publishes Běncǎo Gāngmù or Compendium of Materia Medica, containing 1,892 distinct herbs and other materia medica.
	1609	Santorio Santorio introduces the clinical thermometer in Sanctorii Sanctorii Commentaria in primam fen primi libri Canonis Avicennae.
	1628	William Harvey explains that the heart pumps blood into arteries and that veins carry blood back to the heart.
	1630–1640	Jesuit missionaries learn of the anti-malarial properties of the bark of the Cinchona tree, which native people had used for hundreds of years to treat fevers.
	1665	*“The Great Plague of London, 1665”*
	1696	Morton presents the first detailed clinical description of malaria and its treatment with cinchona.
	1701	Giacomo Pylarini gives the first smallpox inoculations in Europe. They were widely practiced in the east before then.
	1717	Giovanni Maria Lancisi links malaria with poisonous vapors from swamps and names the disease malaria for bad air.
	1721	*“The Boston Smallpox Epidemic, 1721”*
	1790s	Samuel Hahnemann rages against the prevalent practice of bloodletting as a universal cure and founds homeopathy.
	1793	*“The Yellow Fever Epidemic in Philadelphia, 1793”*
	1796	Edward Jenner develops a smallpox vaccination method.
	1800	“Tuberculosis in Europe and US, 1800–1922”
	1831	“Cholera Epidemics in the 19th Century”
	1847	Ignaz Semmelweis discovers how to prevent puerperal fever, a blood infection passed to women by their doctor or midwife during childbirth. It killed one third of mothers in some hospitals.
	1849	Elizabeth Blackwell is the first woman to graduate from medical school. John Snow publishes On the Mode of Communication of Cholera and proposes that cholera is a waterborne disease.
	1851	First International Sanitary Conference takes place in Paris.
	1852–1860	Third cholera epidemic affects mainly Russia, with over one million deaths.
	1854	John Snow demonstrates a dramatic decrease in cholera after the handle to the community water pump is removed in London’s Soho district.
	1859	Second International Sanitary Conference takes place in Paris.
	1863–1875	Fourth cholera epidemic spreads, mostly in Europe and Africa.
	1866	Third International Sanitary Conference takes place in Constantinople.
	1874	Fourth International Sanitary Conference takes place in Vienna.
	1890	Microscopical observations by Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran show malaria parasites in a slide of fresh blood.
	1891	Fifth International Sanitary Conference takes place in Washington, D.C.
	1885	Sixth International Sanitary Conference takes place in Rome.
	1888	Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran identifies the malaria parasite.
	1889–1890	Nikolai A. Sakharov in 1889 and Ettore Marchiafava and Angelo Celli in 1890 identify Plasmodium falciparum.
	1890	Emil von Behring discovers antitoxins and uses them to develop tetanus and diphtheria vaccines.
	1892	Seventh International Sanitary Conference takes place in Venice.
	1892	Eighth International Sanitary Conference takes place in Dresden.
	1894	Ninth International Sanitary Conference takes place in Paris.
	1895	Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovers medical use of X-rays (Röntgen rays) for medical imaging.
	1896	Anna Wessels Williams and William Park improve methodology for large-scale production of diphtheria antitoxin.
	1897	Tenth International Sanitary Conference takes place in Venice.
	1898	Giovanni Batista Grassi proves that the Anopheles mosquito transmits malaria to people.
	1903	Eleventh International Sanitary Conference takes place in Paris.
	1904	“Tropical Deases and the Construction of the Panama Canal, 1904–1914”
	1911–1912	Twelfth International Sanitary Conference takes place in Paris.
	1914	US completes construction of the Panama Canal.
	1918	“Spanish Influenza in North America, 1918–1919”
	1923	First vaccine developed against diphtheria.
	1926	Thirteenth International Sanitary Conference takes place in Paris.
	1927	First vaccine developed against tuberculosis. J. Wagner von Jauregg treats syphilis by inoculating patients with the malaria pathogen to induce fever and destroy the temperature-sensitive syphilis bacteria (Treponema pallidum).
	1928	Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin.
	1938	Fourteenth International Sanitary Conference takes place in Paris.
	1943	Chloroquine synthesized to treat malaria.
	1948	The World Health Organization is founded.

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