A podcast and blog created by historians Merle Eisenberg and Lee Mordechai, historians of disease, the environment, and medieval history. The podcast aims to both provide a flavor of past disease outbreaks while also discussing some pressing present questions. Some episodes discuss a historical pandemic as a way to give a sense of what has happened in the past to contextualize the present. Other episodes will feature experts to discuss specific aspects of disease from quarantine to disease modeling. Future episode arcs will include episodes with scholars on, for example, the forced vaccinations of slaves, black infant mortality, and LGBT rights during the HIV pandemic. The project also plans to expand coverage of historiographical debates and introduce additional diseases such as polio and Ebola.

The podcast argues for the importance of the past’s complexity and the contingent and structural forces that shape human responses to infectious disease outbreaks. It aims to showcase that the past does not offer simple lessons that can be taken from history and simply applied in the present.