It's official: with this issue of On Wisconsin, everything old is new again. Just take a look at “Listening to Typhoid Mary,” David Tenenbaum MA'86's article about Judith Leavitt and her research into the politics of quarantine.

First off, quarantine itself is an old practice — as Tenenbaum points out, it's been used to control the spread of disease for many centuries. And yet, as we discovered with the SARS outbreak, it's still one of our most effective tools for keeping an illness from becoming an epidemic. Then there's Leavitt's research about Mary Mallon, which led to a book in 1996 — Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public's Health. Thanks to an October PBS special, Leavitt's book (as well as Typhoid Mary herself) is back in fashion.

The past just keeps bubbling back up — all through this issue, really. In Najaf, Iraq, Rachel Roe JD'01 finds herself dealing with the same issues of nation-building that Professor William Westermann faced eighty-five years earlier. And Diane McFarland Bady '72 uses protest tactics she learned on campus in the 1960s to fight for environmental causes in the Appalachians today.

So sit back, relax, and take a trip through time with On Wisconsin.