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Health Checks on History

Ming Yang, Caroline Rance

History’s outbreaks, policies and turning points that built public health - and the lessons they keep teaching us.

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Substack
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Latest Issues

What I learnt writing about health history

When I started Health Checks on History in May 2025, I wanted a space to explore the histories of health and disease with greater depth and curiosity. As a public health editor of a Nature journal, it has also given me room to step beyond t...

5 days ago
22
15

Disease helped decide the Crusades

A medieval depiction of crusading warfare: the Battle of Dorylaeum, 1147. Source: Estoire d’Eracles.

We tend to remember the Crusades as if they were an overproduced medieval war film with glittering armour, lots of banners, and men with f...

12 days ago
20
4

The unfinished history of cholera

A satirical cartoon by William Heath in 1828 showing a woman dropping her tea-cup in horror upon discovering the monstrous contents of a magnified drop of Thames water.

Cholera has been explained several times over the past two centuries....

19 days ago
23
8

Japan’s pollution scandals made illness ordinary

Warning: This article contains descriptions and images of chemical poisoning that some readers may find distressing.

Patients and relatives carry photographs of victims of the Minamata disease scandal, on the last day of the Minamata trial...

a month ago
17
2

Smallpox followed a steamboat

Bird’s-eye view of the Mandan village by George Catlin (c1837-1839). The Mandan nation was devastated by the 1837 smallpox epidemic. Source: Smithsonian American Art Museum.

At the Missouri river landing, the steamboat SS. St. Peter cough...

a month ago
22
2

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Authors

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  • Ming Yang

    I’m an editor at Nature Medicine, working in epidemiology, public and global health. I write here to explore how history shapes the way we think about health today. Views are my own.

  • Caroline Rance

    Historian, speaker and writer about the history of medicine - especially quacks and patent remedies. Also co-host of the literature podcast She Wrote Too.

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