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, recently delivered “A Bird’s Eye View: Influenza Pandemics Across History,” at an April 2025 gathering of Profs and Pints in Washington, D.C.

Ed Ingebretsen likely was not thinking about Ukraine as he prepared a recent presentation on the relationship between humans and animals. But when it came time to deliver his talk—during a Meetup just days after Russia sent troops to Ukraine’s eastern regions—he explicitly made the connection between humans’ willingness to dominate animals and—in Ukraine’s case—other people.

“I do not apologize for making the kinds of links I am making between situations in social history as well as current military history,” Ingebretsen told an online audience of about 70 people.

At the heart of Ingebretsen’s argument is that the assumed superiority of humans over other animals—speciesism—is comparable and even allows for other unacceptable forms of discriminiation such as racism and sexism. He points to an image of a collar, dated 1857, from Birmingham, Alabama. The inscription: “Collar for horses, mules, and dark African niggers.”

“Once we sorted out that humans were exceptions to other animals, when did we start sorting out and hierarchizing humans into higher and lower places?” he asks.

In the beginning

Ingebretsen, an associate professor in the English department and director of the American studies program at George Washington University, cites philosophers and thinkers along the entire gamut of positions on the “vexed” relationship between people and animals. But Ingebretsen places the root of this speciesism squarely with the Western interpretation of the Bible. Specifically, he says, the mindset goes back to Genesis’s mandate to exercise “dominion” over the earth.

He acknowledges that many people interpret this first book of the Bible to mean humans are, in fact, a superior species. But he maintains that reading is “careless.”

“In the beginning, there was no ‘dominion.’ Things were different. All sentient creatures shared Eden together,” he says. Ingebretesen points to another Biblical passage, Isaiah’s vision, where the “wolf shall dwell with the lamb.” Think of Edward Hicks’ “A Peaceable Kingdom.”

“Clearly, this is not a world in which we currently live.”

Ingebretsen cites numerous philosophers who have tackled the thorny topic of the relationship between humans and animals—Aristotle, Augustine, Jeremy Bentham, and John Locke as well as the Greeks and Eastern thinkers. But he also employs science in his task. In 2012, a conference in the United Kingdom on consciousness in human and non-human animals concluded that “the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.” In fact, the researchers specifically noted, humans are no different in this regard from all animals and birds and octupuses.

“Most of us sit here and go, ‘It took them until 2012 to decide this?’” he says. “You can Google the top ten species for intelligence and you will be very surprised.”

Ingebretsen acknowledges he tends to ask more questions than he resolves, but insists a careful re-examination of humans’ relationship with the natural world will encourage a more thoughtful, peaceful relationship with each other. “We can’t undo the history of the last three days. What do we do with the messy world we are now making messier?”

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Meetup presentation

Dominion: What History Teaches Us, by Ed Ingebretson

Additional Reading

Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, by Charles Patterson

Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog, by Gary Francione and Alan Watson