Welcome to the Kotkeye Ride Home for Thursday, September 23rd, 2021. I'm Jackson Bird. Today, the dark side of the history of epidemiology.

Plus, a study that proves, yes, actually, birds were louder and more numerous during lockdown,

and two women in their hundreds who have lived incredible lives and refused to quit doing what they love.

Here are some of the cool things from the news today.

Throughout the pandemic, there's been a boom in attention on previous pandemics and

epidemics. The 1918 flu, various collar outbreaks, even the Black Death. We're curious about how

people responded then and fascinated by findings that certain actions being employed now were actually implemented back then too.

You know, I think about the anti-mask demonstrations in the U.S. in 1918

and six-foot distancing recommendations in 1580s, Sardinia.

But historian Jim Downs, author of the newly released Maladies of Empire,

recently wrote in time about another point in history that led to the development of many of the strategies we use

today and shows both how tools to control an epidemic are often innovated on on the fly

while the crisis is occurring, and how so much of the history of medicine is sickly woven

with the experiences of non-consenting subjects. As Down points out, most people put the origins of

epidemiology with physician John Snow in Victorian London, who was able to control a cholera

outbreak in a poor neighborhood of London after deducing that the disease was spreading via a water pump in the community center.

Though he became known thereafter as the father of epidemiology, Downs explains that Snow had already been a founding member of the London Epidemiological Society for a few years prior to that,

and that among that group

included some physicians who had been investigating epidemics for quite some time.

That Snow was perhaps a leader of the development of modern epidemiology is more accurate,

but there were many who made important breakthroughs before him.

Those just a bit older than him were working

...