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