It has been a privilege to read Violent Appetites, the latest installment of a debate about hangriness that unfolded at Nursing Clio in 2017. At that time, Carla Cevasco and I agreed about the importance of recovering the myriad meanings of hunger in the eighteenth century and disagreed over who experienced “hangriness” – the sensation… Read more →
Tag: American Indians
Nursing for Generations: Kiowa Peoplehood in the Work of Laura Pedrick
When smallpox erupted across the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache Reservation in 1900, local people began to panic. Experienced Kiowa and Comanche healers knew smallpox as a Western disease that usually required Western treatment. Rocky plains made difficult passage for the horse-drawn buggies that Charles Hume and Harry Wheeler, the reservation’s two government physicians, used to… Read more →
Understanding Her Position and Place: An African American Nurse at the Stewart Indian School, 1908-1917
In September 1908, Allie Helena Barnett left her family in Atchison, Kansas, and traveled to Carson City, Nevada, where she had accepted a job as a nurse at the Stewart Indian School. Barnett, an African American woman, had graduated from nursing school at Provident Hospital in Chicago in 1906. At the Stewart Indian School, she… Read more →
Why Eighteenth-Century Hangriness Might Be A Thing (And Why It Matters)
Captured by Abenaki Indians from New Hampshire in 1724, the Englishwoman Elizabeth Hanson described how after a disappointing hunt, her captor “with a very angry Look threw a Stick or Corn-Cob at me,” and threatened to kill her and her children. But, Hanson observed, “when-ever he was in such a Temper, he wanted Food, and… Read more →
“We lost our appetite for food”: Why Eighteenth-Century Hangriness Might Not Be a Thing
In August 2015, Oxford Dictionaries declared that the word “hangry” had entered our common vocabulary. Surely most people living in the twenty-first century have experienced the sense of being simultaneously hungry and angry. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, hunger was also everywhere. A recent NPR essay examines how slaveholders withheld food from enslaved people,… Read more →
Eyes of the Beholder: The Public Health Service Reports on Trachoma in White Appalachia and Indian Country
In 1912, the United States Public Health Service (PHS) set out to survey trachoma rates among two populations: Appalachian Whites in Kentucky and American Indians. I knew about the American Indian survey from my dissertation research on Native health in the early twentieth century. But when I read the report from that study, I was… Read more →