Da’Shaun L. Harrison’s recent book Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness is a call for revolution. “Out there is a reality where fat Black folks are experiencing the harms of anti-Blackness as anti-fatness,” they write; “Black liberation is the end goal, and for it to happen, fat liberation must also be… Read more →
Eileen Sperry
Eileen Sperry
Editor
News from the Dead
On December 14, 1650, 22-year old Anne Greene was led up the gallows in Oxford. She had been charged with infanticide; after sleeping with her employer’s grandson, she gave birth to a child—one she insisted was stillborn—whose body had been found “covered…with dust and rubbish” in the outhouse where she delivered it.1 After praying and… Read more →
The Deathbed: A New Nursing Clio Series
This past fall, when we began work on a Nursing Clio series about death, we never imagined the world would look the way it does today. Early reports of illness in China were limited and, as they often are, written in the confident language of exceptionalism: epidemics happen over there, to other people, in other… Read more →
Plague in the Age of Twitter
I’ve been spending a lot of time on Twitter over the past week. Some evenings, it feels like I can’t help myself. I scroll and refresh, watching as the numbers keep rising: total cases in New York, total cases in the US, restricted travel zones, conferences canceled. Even on their own, the numbers feel unmanageable,… Read more →
Medieval Bodies, Head to Toe
The skeletal diagram in Mansur ibn Ilyas’s fifteenth-century medical text, the Tashrih-i badan-i insan, looks at first glance like it’s been drawn by someone who’s never seen a human body before. The skull is oddly triangular, the jawbone tapering to a sharp point and perched on an over-elongated neck. The script-like scalloping of the clavicle… Read more →