At some point in the future, London will be struck by a dread disease that will lay waste to swathes of society. It’s happened before, and will happen again, the only question is when, and how deadly will the modern plague be? The Museum of London has put on a display looking at London’s past pandemics, and how both the medical profession dealt with the medical impacts, and how society responded to the social impact of so many deaths. We know of the big ones, the Black Death that killed around a third of Londoners, but there have been other plagues which we often don’t think of in such terms, even though their impact was considerable — smallpox, cholera, influenza, and most recently HIV, which is thought to have killed around 40,000 Londoners in the past few decades, making it the second deadliest plague to have hit London after the Black Death. As a display, it’s a mix of information about pandemics in the past, and items relevant to the illnesses, from records of deaths to items