History and development of epidemiology

Circa 400 BCE: Epidemiology's roots are nearly 2500 years old. Hippocrates attempted to explain disease occurrence from a rational rather than a supernatural viewpoint.

Mid-16th century: A doctor from Verona named Girolamo Fracastoro was the first to propose a theory that these very small, unseeable, particles that cause disease were alive. They were considered to be able to spread by air, multiply by themselves and be destroyable by fire.

1543: Girolamo Fracastoro wrote a book De contagione et contagiosis morbis, in which he was the first to promote personal and environmental hygiene to prevent disease.

1662: John Graunt, a London haberdasher and councilman published a landmark analysis of mortality data.

1675: The development of a sufficiently powerful microscope by Anton van Leeuwenhoek provided visual evidence of living particles consistent with a germ theory of disease.

1740: James Lind - designed first experiment to use a concurrently treated control group while studying scurvy – determined limes could prevent scurvy – British sailors became known as “limeys”

1790: Edward Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine using clinical trials using cowpox

1800: William Farr built upon Graunt's work by systematically collecting and analyzing Britain's mortality statistics. Farr, considered the father of modern vital statistics and surveillance, developed many of the basic practices used today in vital statistics and disease classification.

1849-54: John Snow, the “father of field epidemiology/modern epidemiology”, formed and tested a hypothesis on the origin of cholera as waterborne transmission in London - one of the first studies in analytic epidemiology. This was a great example of epidemiology, however, his methods weren’t put into practice until after his death. This has been perceived as a major event in the history of public health and regarded as the founding event of the science of epidemiology

1880s: Louis Pasteur recognized the bacterial cause and developed a vaccine for anthrax

1843-1910: Robert Koch – formalized standards (postulates) to identify organisms with infectious diseases

1910s: Flu pandemic

1920: Joseph Goldberger published a descriptive field study showing the dietary origin of pellagra

1927: Mathematical methods were introduced into epidemiology by Ronald Ross, Anderson Gray McKendrick and others.

1940s: Fluoride supplements added to public water supplies in randomized community trials

1949: Initiation of the Framingham study of risk factors for cardiovascular disease

1950: Epidemiological studies link cigarette smoking and lung cancer, demonstrating the power of case- control study design

1954: Field trial of the Salk polio vaccine - the largest formal human experiment

1954: Publication of the results of a British Doctors Study, led by Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill, which lent very strong statistical support to the suspicion that tobacco smoking was linked to lung cancer.

1959: Mantel and Haenszel develop a statistical procedure for stratified analysis of case-control studies

1960: MacMahon published first epidemiologic text with a systematic focus on study design

1964: US Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health establish criteria for evaluation of causality

1970s: Large community-based trials implemented, such as North Karelia and Stanford Three Communities: worldwide eradication of smallpox

1980s: Chronic disease, injury and occupational epidemiology; HIV epidemic

1990s: Edward Sydenstricker (early 1900’s) became a pioneer public health statistician

2000s: Genetic and molecular epidemiology; health disparities; racialism; HIPAA in the USA; West Nile Virus

2001: 9/11

2002: bioterrorism; anthrax and smallpox threat and vaccinations

2003: SARS, quarantines and public health law; and world-wide epidemiology; BSE in Canada

2004: SARS recurrence; BSE in USA; flu epidemic

2009: H1N1 pandemic

2020: COVID pandemic