Episode 12: Jonathan Jones on how epidemics won the Civil War

In this episode of the First Opinion Podcast, Pat gets a history lesson on the deadly and disgusting diseases of the American Civil War and the important public health lessons to be learned from them, in a conversation with medical historian Jonathan S. Jones.  Diseases like smallpox, measles, and dysentery killed two-thirds of the one million people who died in the Civil War. "Chronic diarrhea" plagued soldiers for decades after the war. And while we no longer depend on digging ditches for latrines, we're still struggling with faith in national public health measures, racial disparities in healthcare, and more.

The conversation was based on Jones' recent First Opinion, "Lessons learned — and forgotten — from the horrific epidemics of the U.S. Civil War."