In January of 2020, a 2011 film called Contagion directed by Stephen Soderbergh catapulted to the top of many personal watch-lists. This is not the result of some clever marketing. The film wasn’t even available in any popular subscription streaming services in the U.S. This started as an internet subculture phenomenon.
Read MoreBy Heather Marshall What I found most compelling about Eula Biss’s On Immunity was how it wed scientific data and logical arguments with emotional and ethical appeals in hopes of reaching the hesitant and the phobic towards vaccination who feel as though they have been left outside of the medical industry. As someone with an…
Read MoreBy 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 MoreLast 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 MoreLast 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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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 MoreImage: 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 MoreThis 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 MoreMy 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 