In 2019, internal medicine physician Lydia Kang teamed up with librarian and historian Nate Pedersen on a potential book. Two years later, their work PATIENT ZERO: A Curious History of the World’s Worst Diseases has arrived, investigating the precise origins of a laundry list of horrifying human ailments. These detailed chapters prove that epidemiological work is rarely cut and dry, a lesson we’re all a bit too familiar with today.
As Kang and Pedersen researched everything from grain-induced hallucinations in the Middle Ages to baffling mad cow outbreaks in the 1980s and the 2001 anthrax attacks, COVID-19 mysteriously emerged thousands of miles away in Wuhan. Discover spoke to the authors to learn how the current pandemic shaped their work — and whether we’ll ever learn from past missteps when tackling outbreaks:
