Coronavirus diary, Monday 7 September

As with wars, pandemics have been a scourge over the centuries, killing millions of people.

Horrific, yes, but they have led to development of medical science and discoveries that have defeated seemingly invincible diseases.

And it is almost certain that coronavirus, the latest scourge, will be defeated.

Countries are vying with each other to find a vaccine to stop the pandemic in its tracks, with Oxford University's research and testing programme offering hope,

It may take months, but there is confidence that the answer will be  found, as has been proved with pandemics more deadly than coronavirus.

The history of medicine goes back to the Stone Age when the first 'doctors' used plants and herbs as the basis of most remedies. 

Hippocrates, a physician in ancient Greece, is the most famous name in medical history, his memory kept alive in the Hippocratic oath of doctors today. 

Vaccination was introduced hundreds of years ago when  Buddhist monks used snake serum against snakebites.

The breakthrough came in 1799 with a vaccine to treat smallpox, perhaps the deadliest disease.

At the end of the 19th century an anti cholera vaccine, discovered and developed by Louis Pasteur, made the world healthier, saving countless lives.

Other major advances include insulin,1922 and penicillin,1928.

There are many reminders of grim isolation hospitals that shielded the public from the victims of infectious diseases. 

The remains of Flat Holm's isolation hospital

I remember as a child the forbidding looking fever hosital at the end of our road and many years later I visited one on the island of Flat Holm in the Bristol Channel, built in 1896 for cholera patients.

Those hospitals have gone, as advances in medicine defeated some of the most deadly illnesses. Diphtheria, for example.

In the early 1940s there were on average 55,000 cases a year in Britain  with 1500 deaths since when there has been only a handful of deaths.

The Sars epidemic in 2002 that started in China in 2002 - 8,000 cases in 26 countries - prompted some countries to prepare for the next pandemic - as it turned out, coronavirus.

Medical history suggests that, as with so many once disastrous plagues and pandemics, coronavirus - Covid-19 - will go the same way as smallpox and cholera.