Academy Work on Pandemics

At crucial moments since its founding in 1780, the Academy has focused on pandemics and the spread of disease. In the aftermath of concerns about possible SARS and avian flu outbreaks, former dean of the Harvard School of Public Health Barry Bloom and Howard Koh, who has been nominated to be Assistant Secretary for Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, delivered remarks on “Preparing for Pandemics.” The issues discussed at the March 8, 2006 meeting, including emergency preparedness and improved surveillance of outbreaks, have contemporary relevance in light of the 2009 H1N1 (swine flu) outbreak. Neither the SARS nor avian flu outbreaks proved to be as devastating as the “Spanish Flu” epidemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 50 million people. Fellow Frederick C. Shattuck (1847-1929) of Harvard Medical School authored a paper while the country was still in the throes of that outbreak titled, “Epidemics of Influenza and Other Diseases,” dated Jan. 8, 1919. The local effects of a major epidemic of yellow fever were examined by Isaac Rand (1743-1822), a Fellow of the Academy and one of the founders of the Massachusetts Medical Society, in a paper titled, “History of the fever which prevailed in the town of Boston, in the summer and fall of the year 1798.” Rand and Fellow John Warren further discussed the epidemic in the second volume of the Academy’s Memoirs (1804), which included the article, “An account of the dissection of three persons who died of the malignant epidemic that prevailed in Boston in the summer of 1798.”

First page of Isaac Rand’s manuscript “on the fever which prevailed in the town of Boston, in the summer and fall of the year 1798” (Full size)

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