A new National Library of Medicine exhibition, guest-curated by Ashley Bowen, examines the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, then the US capital. Dr Benjamin Rush, a physician and reformer, championed abolition and treated patients while the disease killed thousands. Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, two African American ministers, organised relief work and defended their community against accusations in print. Historian Martin Pernick linked the epidemic to the rise of the first American party system. The exhibition traces how the city's responses to disease exposed social and political divisions, and its themes are relevant to later epidemics.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.