In a world of people who want to forget, Alexandra Lord has taken on the radical task of remembering.
What she wants you to remember along with her is the grim reality and important lessons of epidemics and pandemics throughout the world history.
Lord, chair and curator of the Division of Medicine and Science at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, notes that memory of something devastating can actually skip a few generations only to reappear much later. Her immediate example is the influenza pandemic of 1918.
“I’m guessing that everyone in this room knows this event, correct?” she asked a recent Monday-night gathering of about 100 at Penn Social in Washington, D.C.
Hands shoot up.
“One of the things that happens in the wake of a pandemic is the desire to forget,” she said. “If I asked this question 35 years ago, I think many people would say, ‘What? There was a pandemic in 1918?’”
The danger of forgetting
Lord acknowledges that wanting to forget about a pandemic is “understandable, but what's happened over the last 35 years or so is that historians and public health experts have realized that it's really dangerous.”
The danger in forgetting is that people lose their willingness to accept vaccination or to support efforts to find new ones. People lose faith in the ability of masks or quarantine or anything else in the public health arsenal to control disease. Even medical science and public health officials can forget, shifting their professional focus to the chronic diseases that, after all, still top the list of leading causes of death in the United States.
She notes physicians confronting measles today are often seeing the disease for the first time, and can draw on it only from their memories of textbook learning.
“Medicine’s many successes mean that we have forgotten the dangers of infectious diseases. We don't really know what polio looks like anymore. If people saw it all the time, witnessed it, experienced it, we would probably be more aggressive in seeking a vaccine.”
Those who remembered
Lord criticizes neither past nor present actors in communicable disease, but instead pulls from history the names of people and institutions that were pioneers in medicine and refused to forget. The list is long, and extends back centuries. Sometimes, whole institutions get a shout-out: in the late nineteenth century, Johns Hopkins University pioneered the inclusion of laboratory science into medical education.
Jumping forward to the twentieth century, the cast includes the federal workers who did not forget the 1918 pandemic but who instead in 1940 created and supported the Commission on Influenza, more formally the Commission on Influenza of the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board, the full name an implicit nod to the role of troop movements in spreading infectious disease and the threat such disease poses to military readiness.
Later in the twentieth century, Maurice Hilleman, a bacteriologist largely unknown today, would earn the title of the father of modern vaccinology. He is credited with the development of no fewer than 40 vaccines—among them vaccines for measles, mumps, and hepatitis—responsible for saving millions lives each year.
Lessons learned
When COVID-19 appeared, Lord thought she understood the zeitgeist of the country, at least in regard to public health. She was unprepared for the public’s contempt for the uncertain and unpredictable nature of scientific advance.
“I thought Americans understood how science changes. I thought people would have a greater understanding and awareness that science was moving and that it is incredibly fast-paced, so that sometimes things would be corrected and changed. Obviously, didn't happen.”
Still, she makes her final recognition a positive one—for professional rememberers, her fellow historians.
“Public health officials often tell historians, ‘We’re glad that you historians are around,’ because historians remind everybody of what life’s like without antibiotics, without vaccines, without all these treatments.”
Alexandra M. Lord, PhD
Alexandra M. Lord, PhD, recently delivered “A Bird’s Eye View: Influenza Pandemics Across History,” at an April 2025 gathering of Profs and Pints in Washington, D.C.