Seattle, WA policemen wearing face masks during the
influenza epidemic.  

The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 was a quick burning,
destructive, and chaotic flu that wiped out a large swath
of the world’s population. People were told to wear masks
but in many instances some just straight up refused. It was
all due to the lack of accurate folks research into the illness. 

Historian John Barry explained that during the flu of 1918
there was an extreme amount of disinformation going
around: The press did not treat the 1918 flu seriously
during the outbreak, for reasons that are very different
than today.

Warehouses were converted to house the infected people quarantined.

On December 9, 1979, a commission of scientists declared that
smallpox had been eradicated. The disease, which carries around
a 30 percent chance of death for those who contract it, is the only infectious disease afflicting humans that has officially been
eradicated.

The World Health Organization in 1979.

LA County Fire Station 127, the original location for Station
51 on the TV show "Emergency!"

Emergency! is a action-adventure medical drama television series
jointly produced by Mark VII Limited and Universal Television. 

The series debuted on NBC as a midseason replacement on January
15, 1972, replacing the two short-lived situation comedy series The           
Partners and The Good Life.
(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)



        

L-R: Kevin Tighe, Robert Fuller, Julie London, Bobby Troup
and Randolph Mantooth.

Real-life Dispatcher, Sam Lanier, made several appearances throughout the series.

On November 8, 1895, physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen 
(1845-1923) became the first person to observe X-rays, a
significant scientific advancement that would ultimately
benefit a variety of fields, most of all medicine, by making
the invisible visible.

Röntgen’s discovery occurred accidentally in his Wurzburg,
Germany, lab, where he was testing whether cathode rays
could pass through glass when he noticed a glow coming
from a nearby chemically coated screen. He dubbed the rays
that caused this glow X-rays because of their unknown nature.

Sir Alexander Fleming  (6 August 1881 – 11 March 1955)

Sir Alexander Fleming was a young bacteriologist when an
accidental discovery led to one of the great developments
of modern medicine on September 3, 1928. Having left a
plate of staphylococcus bacteria uncovered, Fleming noticed
that a mold that had fallen on the culture had killed many of
the bacteria. He identified the mold as penicillium notatum,
similar to the kind found on bread.

In 1929, Fleming introduced his mold by-product called
penicillin to cure bacterial infections.