I can hear some of you say, “Can’t we talk about something more pleasant?” That’s the same question American cartoonist Roz Chast’s parents asked her when she wanted to talk to them about their deaths. Her title represents the general attitude towards death in American society today. Even in the midst of a global pandemic,… Read more →
Tag: COVID-19
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 →
Pandemic Academic: Mothering from the Home Office
Twelve years ago, Baby #2 fell asleep in her carseat on the way to the hospital for the weekly mother’s support group. Insomniac Baby #1 had taught us a crucial sanity lesson: let sleeping people sleep. So I picked up Mama, PhD from the passenger seat and settled in for some unexpected reading. Since the… Read more →
The Cruise Ship as Disease Heterotopia
We know the images: cruise ships with sick passengers searching for a place to dock or turned into off-shore quarantine sites as passengers and crew are not allowed to disembark. In the time of COVID-19, the cruise ship has become a harbinger of and a vector for contagion and death. This is not new. Cruise… Read more →
Living in Isolation and Connecting through Reading, 1930–1946
Amid all the dramatic headlines about COVID-19, news stories describe how people now share anniversaries, birthdays, and other occasions with windows between them to prevent the spread of infection to those most vulnerable to its consequences. These twenty-first century encounters remind me of early twentieth-century letters I read in the Iowa Women’s Archives, written during… Read more →
Writing Histories of Intimate Care and Social Distancing in the Age of COVID-19
In hindsight, it was probably a touch of grad school-induced hubris that led me to assert, in an early draft of my dissertation, that the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries were marked by chronic disease epidemics. I based this conclusion on the work of scholars like sociologist Bryan Turner, who in 1987 wrote almost… Read more →
Ordinary Death in a Pandemic
On Tuesday, March 17, 2020, shortly after noon, my mother, Carol Lenoir Price Swedberg, died in home hospice at the age of 90. I had arrived to be by her side three days earlier despite the fact that COVID-19 had already started to disrupt travel and other aspects of our daily lives. Mom died an… Read more →
Dr. Fauci and My Mom
In these scary times, many of us find comfort in watching Dr. Anthony Fauci on TV. I like seeing Dr. Fauci for another reason: he rekindles memories of my mom, who died in 1990. Dr. Fauci was my mother’s doctor. For five years in the 1980s, she was a patient at the National Institute of… Read more →
Joking in the Time of Pandemic: The 1889–92 Flu and 2020 COVID-19
As we see with COVID-19, the darkest periods in history expose the best — and worst — of humanity. Some people become virulently racist. Others spend hours caring for the most afflicted. Still more look for safe outlets to vent their fear and anger, often fleeing to laughter to do so. As a number of… 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 →