Faculty Spotlight: Lee Dugatkin, "Nary a Horse Left Standing"

Event Instances

• Tuesday, October 20, 2026 1:00 P.M.

Event Details

Nary a Horse Left Standing: How an 1872 Horse Flu Pandemic Slowed Urban Life in the US to a Crawl

In the 1870s, horses were the lifeblood of North American cities. New York, Boston, Chicago, and Toronto relied on tens of thousands of workhorses to power daily life. Then, in late 1872 and into 1873, a devastating outbreak of horse flu—known as the Great Epizootic—swept across the continent. Dr. Dugatkin chronicles this little-known crisis, revealing how the epidemic disrupted nearly every aspect of urban life. From coast to coast, livelihoods collapsed as horses lay on stable floors sick—or worse, dying; fires raged unchecked without horse-drawn wagons; and city development stalled for lack of horsepower. Just as the Gilded Age was dawning and industrialists were poised to amass fortunes, the flu slowed progress to a crawl.

In this Faculty Spotlight talk, Professor Lee Dugatkin (Biology) will present from his forthcoming book, Nary a Horse Left Standing: How a Nineteenth-Century Epidemic Transformed Medicine, Animal Welfare, and the Modern City (MIT Press, 2026). Dr. Dugatkin is an evolutionary biologist and a historian of science in the Department of Biology at the University of Louisville. He is the author of seventeen books and more than 200 articles, in such journals as Nature, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and The Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, and a contributing author to Scientific American, The American Scientist, The New Scientist and The Washington Post.

Sponsored by the Liberal Studies program.