What does the Visual Time Traveller have to say about plagues and viruses? Quite a lot — they feature on at least 13 pages:
- 1510 The first known influenza pandemic originates in Asia.
- 1546 Girolamo Fracastoro proposes that epidemic diseases are caused by transferable tiny particles or ‘spores’ that can transmit infection by direct or indirect contact.
- 1629 German and French troops carry the bubonic plague across the Alps into Italy.
- 1665 Margaret Porteous is the first person on record to die in the Great Plague of London.
- 1666 Isaac Newton develops his (a version of calculus) during the Great Plague of London.
- 1720 The Great Plague of Marseille is the last major outbreak of bubonic plague in Europe.
- 1796 Edward Jenner discovers that immunity to smallpox can be produced by inoculation with material from the cowpox virus, a process that will become known as vaccination.
- 1870 Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch establish the germ theory of disease.
- 1894 Alexandre Yersin isolates the bacterium that caused the third pandemic of the bubonic plague.
- 1909 Lansteiner, Levaditi and Popper discover the polio virus.
- 1974 The first transgenic mammal is created by integrating DNA from the SV40 virus into the genome of mice.
- 1999 E-mail systems across the world become congested due to propagation of the Melissa virus.
- 1982 Elk Cloner is one of the first known microcomputer viruses to spread ‘in the wild’ via floppy disc.
Alison Hackett 19 March 2020 Gallery of pictures on Facebook here
