Plague. Typhus. Cholera. HIV/AIDS and more. In Entomology 216N, students study an array of diseases through the ages, looking at them from historical, cultural, scientific, and socioeconomic perspectives, to understand the bigger story surrounding each one. “We look at what disease is, what its taxonomy is, how it works, how it makes you sick, and how all that intersects with history,” says instructor Michael Skvarla. “I want students to think about each of the plagues we look at in a broader context than the disease itself.”

Skvarla, who is also the director of the Insect Identification Lab at University Park, covers a different disease every week of the semester, looking at each one’s evolutionary history—“what is it about the bubonic plague that allowed it to outbreak like it did in Europe? What is it about typhus that allowed it to erupt in armies in the 1700s and 1800s and kill more soldiers than bullets did?”—and how they were perceived in both older and modern history. Students discuss arthropod vectors, how different diseases spread, and how different societies through time have both perceived and dealt with the impact of disease. “We’ll look at the early history of bubonic plague, how it affected ancient Greece, and how they responded to it,” says Skvarla. “In another lecture we’ll talk about a different plague, and how it was dealt with in the Middle Ages. The students have to pull together information from different portions of class to then construct an overall narrative.”

That narrative includes understanding the treatments for different diseases and how these have evolved over time and helped eradicate, or diminish, the existence of some diseases in some parts of the world even as those diseases still exist elsewhere in the world. It’s a section of his class that’s particularly important to Skvarla.

“I like the students to know that while we may have gotten a disease like HIV/AIDS under control in wealthy countries, it is still a problem in Africa, for numerous reasons, including that we here haven’t done enough to try and get it under control there,” he says.

For their final assignment, ENT 216N students have to pick a disease that isn’t covered in class and showcase its story in any format they choose. Last year, a group of three students chose to write and act out a small skit on leprosy. “They did a flash back and a flash forward,” says Skvarla,” flashing back 1,000 years ago to a crusader king in the Holy Land—based on a real person—who has leprosy and is dying. The king and his advisor talk about leprosy, what it is, and what they would do about it, and then the students flashed forward to a modern-day physician who told them what they were thinking was wrong and gave them the actual facts on leprosy.”