I'm a medical librarian and with a history background

So it's probably no surprise that this interests me:

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson from Book Videos on Vimeo.

For more, see The Ghost Map: Hard Lessons in Epidemiology from Victorian London by Maria Popova

and here's the book itself:
The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson (which is cheaper than the Kindle edition).