Skip to main content

The timeline can be navigated with the “Scroll Left” and “Scroll Right” buttons or by dragging the pointer to a date on the timeline waveform (located at the bottom of the screen on the desktop version and on the left of the screen on mobile). To filter by a particular topic and see a smaller section of the data, make a selection on the dropdown “Filters” menu or click “Search” to do a keyword search. Hover over the abbreviated filter tags in the blue boxes to see the complete name of the filter, or click a filter to display all the data with this tag. If you want to take a deeper dive into a specific topic by viewing a narrative essay page and a curated timeline, click on “Stories.”

Read More

The responsibility of tracking and controlling epidemics falls on the U.S. Marine Hospital Service

1878

The Story of Marine Health
PH
EPD
MED
MIL

The forerunner to the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) begins tracking morbidity rates related to illnesses such as smallpox, cholera, yellow fever, and the plague. This process begins in an effort to determine who needs to quarantine and for how long in order to reduce the spread of these contagious diseases. Concurrently, physicians are encouraged to begin documenting illness and death rates among their patients for reporting to state-level public health agencies as they emerge.

The Marine Hospital Service is also authorized by Congress to collect morbidity reports from U.S. consuls overseas, in order to determine how to prevent diseases from entering the United States and spreading.