Medical History

Though the AIDS epidemic had been raging for nearly a decade, by 1988, the FDA had only cleared a single drug to treat it. Frustrated with what they considered a deadly lack of initiative, AIDS patients, community activists, friends, and family marched to the FDA's headquarters in Rockville to demand more treatments, more urgency, and more understanding.

There’s a common saying (and belief) that Washington, D.C. was built on a swamp. While that’s not actually the case, it is true that the District’s rivers and tributaries—and the surrounding marshland—have caused some problems in the past. In the nineteenth century, the low-lying area around the National Mall and Tidal Basin was the perfect breeding ground for one of the largest public health concerns at the time: mosquitoes. One enterprising doctor had a very inventive solution.

In the early 19th-century, Washington, D.C. had a problem: what to do with their population of the mentally ill. Dorothea Dix, a healthcare reform crusader from Massachusetts, came to their aid and, with a team of politicians and doctors, catalyzed the construction of what would come to be known as St. Elizabeths.

Weeks after the bloodiest day of the American Civil War, a remarkably preserved human arm was allegedly discovered near the Antietam Battlefield. After several decades and a series of owners, the arm was anonymously donated to a Frederick, Maryland museum. The identity of the person who lost the arm remains a mystery, but cutting edge research into the arm has a lot to say about the experience of Civil War soldiers.

Today, Washington has a lively drag scene, from brunches to balls. But the roots of that culture extend past Stonewall. In the 1880s, a freed slave named William Dorsey Swann crowned himself the first drag "queen" at gatherings in and around the Dupont Circle neighborhood.

During the Civil War, the U.S. Capitol served stints as a military barracks, a bakery, and a hospital for wounded soldiers, all while the building was under construction. After the war, the bakery was dismantled and the soldiers left — well, all but one …

To close off Women's History Month, learn about Sarah Marinda Loguen Fraser, the first woman to receive an M.D. from the Syracuse University College of Medicine, and the fourth Black woman to become a licensed physician in the United States. While her extraordinary life took her all around the world, including New York, the Dominican Republic and France, some of the most important landmarks of her life happened in Washington, D.C.

In December of 1986, parents were rushing to the stores to snatch a Cabbage Patch Kid, G.I. Joe or Teddy Ruxpin off the shelf before they were all gone. That same month, the generosity of a local benefactor was a touching reminder of what the holiday season is really about. On Dec. 21, 1986, Robert Alfandre welcomed 30 people infected with AIDS into his home in northwest Washington for a Christmas party.

April 26, 1954, wasn’t an ordinary day at work for Dr. Richard Mulvaney. As McLean, Virginia’s first general practitioner, he treated all types of patients, but he’d never dealt with a situation like the one that awaited him at Franklin Sherman Elementary School that morning.

On October 11, 1987, Washingtonians woke up to an elaborate quilt blanketing the National Mall, with 1,920 panels stitching together the memory of thousands of individuals who had succumbed to the AIDS epidemic in America. The AIDS Memorial Quilt helped push the disease into mainstream America's consciousness. But for Washington's gay community, the battle against AIDS had been raging for almost a decade.