Sitting down with Howard Markel

Howard Markel, a social and culture historian of medicine, is, as he says, one of only three experts on quarantine procedures in the United States. He has worked with the CDC and Department of Defense on issues of public health and epidemics and became a central voice in the media during the Ebola outbreak earlier this year.

The Herald sat down with Dr. Markel to learn about his failed attempts as a fiction writer, his work in AIDS clinics in the 1980s, and how to look at the Ebola epidemic through a historical lens.