Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, a number of historians of medicine and other scholars have written and given interviews about past public health crises. E. Thomas Ewing’s look at how newspapers focused on kissing during the 1918 influenza outbreak suggested that the emphasis on kissing via handkerchief 100 years ago signaled potentially troubling questions for… Read more →
Ray Ball
Ray Ball
Contributor
Going Baroque for Babies
A few months ago, a friend and I were chatting about plans for a baby shower that she was hosting for another friend of ours. She told me that our friend’s mother had called to ask what the theme or the designated color of the shower would be in order to have matching flowers and… Read more →
Medical Metaphors: The Long History of the Corrupted Body Politic
For the past few years, my Facebook feed has been full of political memes. Quite a few critique or satirize a particular issue or person, but many are about political corruption in a more general sense. Polls indicate that even before the 2016 election, Americans on both sides of the aisle believed that government corruption… Read more →
Public Theater and Health Care in the Early Modern Spanish World
In May of 1646, don Duarte Fernando Álvarez de Toledo Portugal, the Viceroy of the Kingdom of Valencia, wrote a letter to King Philip IV. The Spanish monarch, who ruled over the various territories that comprised the Crown of Castile (including overseas dominions in the Americas) and the Crown of Aragón (which included Catalonia, Valencia,… Read more →