By Patricia Harte-Maxwell Lake Geneva, Wisconsin The 2021 U.S. National Snow Sculpting Championship, a 72-hour marathon of sawing, hacking, chipping, engraving, and, of course, shovelling, was held in early February in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin as part of a larger event called Winterfest. The competition drew 11 teams from around the country: 3 teams from Wisconsin…
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Vaccine Skepticism and the Gender Binary
Kelly McGuire A National Geographic and Morning Consult poll released earlier this week filled many with consternation when it revealed that fully one quarter of respondents identifying as women indicated that they were unlikely to take a coronavirus vaccine when one came available.[i] This news shook the optimism of those triumphantly celebrating the Pfizer and…
Read MoreThe Miraculous Vaccine: Influenza Brings Perspective to SARS-CoV-2 and the Reality of Vaccination
By Patricia Harte-Maxwell In 1722 Mr. Maitland’s Account of Inoculating the Small Pox was published in England. The goal of the account was to give “to the World a certain Method of Relieving Mankind, and rescuing them from Fears and fatal Effects of that very loathsome and malignant Disease” (2) known as smallpox. For Maitland,…
Read MoreRethinking Vaccination through Eula Biss’s On Immunity
Last week we explored the weird and wonderful world of eighteenth-century inoculation pamphlets and the stories they contain, trying to puzzle out how it was that this experimental technique in the 1720s galvanized thinking around the functioning of what we today refer to as the immune system. I’ve struggled somewhat with this week’s blog because…
Read MoreHistories of Immunity
Last week we spent some time talking about the future in relation to the COVID-19 vaccine and speculative medicine. In this rather lengthy (apologies!) blog, I will be exploring some of the pre-history of medical immunity to which early eighteenth-century debates on inoculation give us access. Obviously, early physicians theorized about defences in the body…
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Health Humanities and the Immune System as Public Text
The Health Humanities is a field of study that invites us to question everything, from the way our bodies are read by medical authorities, to how disease is itself constructed in the popular imagination. As an area, Health Humanities opens up perspectives on health and medicine that too often remain uninterrogated, and are too often…
Read MoreMask Refusal and Western Culture
Image: A 15 second CNN ad accompanied by upbeat music and a shifting montage of individualized masks—bearing among other images those of flags, camo markings, Pride rainbows, I heart Fauci declarations, and the superman insignia–states simply that “a mask can say a lot about a person who wears it and even more about a person…
Read MoreAbout This Blog
This blog is intended to serve as a conversation space for my graduate class on Imagining Immunity and for those who are interested in debates relating to a future COVID-19 vaccine from a Health Humanities perspective. I will be contributing pieces on a regular basis and will invite guest contributors to do so as well.…
Read MoreAbout Me
My work falls into the category of the Health Humanities, as I work on the cultural representation of disease from the eighteenth-century to the present. I continue to write on suicide, elegy, mourning, and death, but my chief interest is in the development of medical individualism in the West and the role that it has…
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Vaxxers 