Smallpox was the scourge of the eighteenth century: it showed no mercy, almost wiping out whole societies. Young and old, poor and royalty were equally at risk – unless they had survived a previous attack. Daniel Sutton, a young surgeon from Suffolk,...

The "miracle drug" penicillin was first given intravenously to a patient in Oxford on 12 February 1941, leading to a transformation in the way that bacterial infection is understood and treated. What was to become one of the greatest stories in biome...

When plague broke out in Manchuria in 1910 as a result of transmission from marmots to humans, it struck a region struggling with the introduction of Western medicine, as well as with the interactions of three different national powers: Chinese, Japa...