Black Death epidemic

Second, we have to compare the rate of scientific progress in the AIDS epidemic with other epidemics that have had great impacts on society for example, the Black Death (plague) caused by Yersinia pestis. Plague caused a major epidemic in the fifth century and a second major epidemic in the fourteenth century. The infectious agent Yersina pestis was isolated in 1908. Effective therapy against the disease had to wait for the development of classical antibiotics in the 1940s. 

Historically, epidemiology originated in relation to the study of the great epidemic diseases such as cholera, bubonic plague, (often referred to as Black Death in the Middle Ages) smallpox, yellow fever and typhus. These disease were associated with high mortality and, until the twentieth century, were the most important threats to life. 

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