“Here is public health’s bind,” wrote science journalist Ed Yong recently in The Atlantic: “Though it is so fundamental that it can’t (and arguably shouldn’t) be tied to any one type of emergency, emergencies are the one force that can provide enough urgency to strengthen a system that, under normal circumstances, is allowed to rot.”… Read more →
Category: News
The Agency of the Irresponsible
Like many faculty at state universities, the beginning of this school year brings me more terror than excitement. Colorado Mesa University (CMU), the institution at which I have taught since 1999, will require neither masks nor vaccines for students, and faculty cannot enforce mask mandates in the classrooms. This flies in the face of… Read more →
Right All the Way Through: Dr. Minerva Goodman and the Stockton Mask Debate during the 1918-1919 Influenza Epidemic
During the 1918-19 influenza epidemic, Stockton, California, adopted a mask ordinance three times, totalling more than seventy days. In late December 1918, Dr. Minerva Goodman, the recently appointed city health officer, lost a debate about ending the second mask ordinance to those advocating a return to normal activities. Just weeks later, as cases rose again,… Read more →
A Historic Intersex Awareness Day
This year’s Intersex Awareness Day, October 26, marked a historic pivot. A few days before, Boston Children’s Hospital revealed that its physicians would no longer perform certain nonconsensual infant genital surgeries on babies born with atypical genitals. They join the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago, which made a similar announcement in… Read more →
Sunday Morning Medicine
Contact your senators. Vote. May her memory be a revolution.
Sunday Morning Medicine
A weekly check-up of gender, medicine, and history in the news Elvis in the box. “Are you popular?” Skating on stolen land. Jingle Dress Dancers and pandemics. Cannabis in the 1950s British tabloids. The hidden Black history of Lovecraft Country. Gerald Ford rushed out a vaccine. It was a fiasco. One sperm donor. 36 children…. Read more →
An Open Letter to the Stanton Foundation
To the Stanton Foundation: When the Stanton Foundation announced their COVID-19 prize in April, the Nursing Clio (NC) team was thrilled. As a site that publishes extensively on the history of medicine, NC supported the idea of a prize rewarding public-facing historical work contextualizing a pandemic. The Stanton Foundation was inspired by the American Historical… Read more →
Asymptomatic Lethality: Cooper, COVID-19, and the Potential for Black Death
Black people in the United States have long known that all white people, at any time, have the potential to hurt them. For centuries, white people have had easy access to histories of racial power and deploy them, almost like a pathogen, against Black people. Against people like me. Before the country erupted into a… Read more →
Absolutely Disgusting: Wet Markets, Stigma Theory, and Xenophobia
Since the initial descriptions of cases of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan, there has been a persistent focus on “wet markets” and their role in spreading the virus. Wet markets are similar to farmers’ markets, offering stalls selling fresh meat and produce, with some markets featuring the slaughtering of animals on-site, which can – albeit… Read more →
Sunday Morning Medicine
A weekly check-up of gender, medicine, and history in the news We are at war. On grief, history, and COVID-19. The history of the Hawaiian shirt. Sex in the time of the Black Death. A brief criminal history of the mask. A history of mass graves for the poor. Horseback-riding nurses of the 1930s. Americans… Read more →