Rise and Fall of the U.S. Public Health Service

Episodes

1. Episode 1 — The Guard at the Gates (1798)

   Long before the CDC, the United States built its first health system for merchant sailors.

2. Episode 2 — A Uniformed but Unarmed Service (1870–1912)

   How a scattered set of sailors' hospitals became a uniformed corps of officers.

3. Episode 3 — Citadels of Science (1887–1948)

   The Public Health Service's most durable power was the microscope.

4. Episode 4 — Disease Detectives: The Founding of the EIS (1951)

   How a Cold War fear of germ warfare created the world's most famous corps of outbreak investigators.

5. Episode 6 — Into the Hot Zone: Naming Ebola (1976)

   In 1976 a bleeding fever erupted at once in northern Zaire (around the Yambuku mission) and southern Sudan, killing the very nurses and missionaries who cared for the sick.

6. Episode 7 — Expansion and Its Shadow: The IHS and Tuskegee (1932–1976)

   The moral center of the series.

7. Episode 8 — The Bully Pulpit and the 1968 Evisceration (1964–1994)

   The thesis episode.

8. Episode 9 — The Diminishment, Part I: Starved and Shuttered (1965–1981)

   The first of two episodes on the PHS's long decline.

9. Episode 10 — The Diminishment, Part II: The Modern Stepchild (1980s–2026)

   The series finale.

10. Episode 11 — Yellow Fever: The Disease That Forced Washington Into Public Health

    Series 2 opener (the disease anthology).

11. Episode 12 — Cholera: The Blue Death That Nationalized Quarantine (1832–1893)

    Cholera as the disease that organized American public health from the city up to the federal government.

12. Episode 13 — The 1918 Influenza Pandemic: The PHS's First Mass-Casualty Test

    The deadliest event in American public-health history (~675,000 dead) as a test of what the U.S.

13. Episode 14 — Smallpox: From Washington's Inoculation Order to Eradication

    The only human disease ever wiped from the earth — and the disease through which America twice tried to build a federal vaccine power.

14. Episode 15 — Tuberculosis: The White Plague and the Sanatorium Movement

    Tuberculosis — consumption, the White Plague — was the leading cause of death in 19th-century America (roughly one in seven), with no cure for sixty years after the germ was found.

15. Episode 16 — Bubonic Plague: The Outbreak San Francisco Tried to Hide

    In March 1900 a Chinese immigrant was found dead in a San Francisco basement and a federal scientist confirmed bubonic plague — the first case ever verified on U.S.

16. Episode 17 — Diphtheria: The Strangling Angel and the Birth of Vaccine Regulation

    Diphtheria — the 'Strangling Angel of Children' — suffocated the young; at its 1921 peak it caused 200,000+ US cases and 15,000+ deaths.

17. Episode 18 — Typhoid: The Killer Beaten With Pipes and Standards

    Typhoid fever was the price American cities paid for drinking their own sewage — and it was conquered not by a drug but by sand filters, chlorine, and a federal standard.

18. Episode 19 — Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever: The Lab in the Schoolhouse

    On the west side of Montana's Bitterroot Valley a tick-borne fever killed up to 80-90% of those it struck.

19. Episode 20 — Typhus: Ship Fever, Jail Fever, and the Vaccine Factory

    Typhus has killed more soldiers than combat for most of history — and it's not typhoid, nor the Bolivian 'black typhus' that turned out to be a virus.

20. Episode 21 — Malaria: The Disease That Created the CDC

    Malaria wasn't a tropical postcard — it was an American disease, endemic across the South and the Mississippi Valley.

21. Episode 22 — Polio: Private Philanthropy's Triumph, the Regulator's Role

    Polio was the summer terror that paralyzed children and filled wards with iron lungs, peaking in the US at nearly 58,000 cases in 1952.

22. Episode 23 — Measles: From Universal Rite to Resurgent Threat

    Before 1963, measles infected nearly every American child — 3-4 million cases a year, tens of thousands hospitalized, hundreds dead.

23. Episode 24 — Whooping Cough (Pertussis): Two Women, a Vaccine, and the Erosion of Trust

    Whooping cough once killed about 6,000 American children a year.

24. Episode 25 — Rabies: The Perfect Killer, Held at Bay (1885–2007)

    Rabies is the disease that should terrify us most and kills us least: near-100% fatal once symptoms begin, yet fewer than ten Americans die of it a year.

25. Episode 26 — West Nile: The Virus America Never Cured (1999–2026)

    In the late summer of 1999, an old-world virus arrived in New York the way plagues used to — with the dead.

26. Episode 27 — Syphilis: The Shadow on the Land (1906–2026)

    Syphilis exposes everything about American public health at once — its reach, its power, and its capacity for cruelty.

27. Episode 28 — Gonorrhea: The Bug That Beat Every Drug (1879–2026)

    Gonorrhea is humanity's oldest venereal companion and its sharpest modern warning.

28. Episode 29 — Chlamydia: The Silent Epidemic

    Chlamydia is the loudest silent disease in America.

29. Episode 30 — HIV/AIDS: From a Two-Page Report to a Manageable Disease (1981–2026)

    The defining plague of the late twentieth century announced itself, in the federal record, with a two-page bulletin: five young men in Los Angeles and a pneumonia that should not have touched them, in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of June 5, 1981.

30. Episode 31 — Rubella: The Mild Disease That Maimed the Unborn (1941–2004)

    Rubella is the disease that hides its cruelty.

31. Episode 32 — Mumps: The Vaccine From a Child's Throat (1963–2026)

    Mumps gave American medicine one of its warmest stories and one of its most humbling lessons.

32. Episode 33 (Finale) — The Immunization Retreat: When the Guard Stood Down (2025–26)

    The finale of the series ends where the news is being written.

33. Episode 5 — A Planeload of Cats vs. Black Typhus: MARU and the Machupo Heroes (1957–64)

    Bolivia, the early 1960s: a terrifying hemorrhagic fever — 'black typhus' — was killing whole families in the village of San Joaquín, and no one knew what it was or how it spread.

34. Episode 34 — COVID-19: The Largest Deployment, the Hardest Test (2020–2023)

    COVID-19 is where every thread of this series pulls taut at once.