With May’s arrival, the United States is now in its third month of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s starting to feel like this public health crisis has dragged on forever. That’s because the vast majority of us have never experienced an outbreak of this magnitude before — which is a testimony to the great strides science and the medical field made in the second half of the 20th century.

Unfortunately, that long run of good health America experienced is the exception rather than the rule. The U.S. has actually endured a surprising number of epidemics in our history. It’s worth revisiting one of the very first to understand how we’ve faced, and survived, such challenges before.