This week, the WHO announced that it would cease to designate COVID-19 a “public health emergency of international concern,” affirming its status instead as an “established and ongoing health issue.” There is a distinction between the emergent and the established, the epidemic and the endemic, the disastrous and the everyday. Bioethics often traffics in disaster—in the…
Author: Emily Waples
Emily Waples is Associate Professor of Biomedical Humanities and Director of the Center for Literature and Medicine at Hiram College.
Against Breasts
More than 16,000 mastectomies were performed in England and Wales in 2009-2010, mine among them. Due to the size of the tumor, the surgeon explained, it would not be possible to perform “breast conserving therapy” (BCT)—more often more referred to in the U.S. by the awkward Latinate term lumpectomy, and in the UK as a…
Jane Austen’s Autopsies
I confess I have not watched the much-maligned adaptation of Persuasion that dropped on Netflix yesterday. But wait, there’s more: I have never read Persuasion. I know. I know. Just as soon as I am finished here, I will slam this laptop closed in trepidation and shame and await the revocation of my English PhD….
How We Teach How We Die
Emily Waples // This year—the most difficult year of my professional and personal life to date—I inherited a class called “How We Die.” Offered as part of my college’s Biomedical Humanities major, as well as fulfilling an “ethics and social responsibility” requirement for our general education curriculum, this four-credit course met for two hours twice…
Notes on Grim
Emily Waples// Last week, we reached a point in this pandemic that has been some eighteen months in the making: more Americans have now died of COVID-19 than of the 1918-1919 flu. I’ve been dreading the moment less for the fact of it than for the fanfare, anticipating the precise terms in which I knew…
Airborne Imaginaries
Emily Waples // This month, the CDC published an update to its coronavirus guidelines, acknowledging the airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2, even at distances greater than now-sacrosanct six-foot radius. The revision was radical only in its belatedness, affirming well-established scientific evidence of aerosol transmission. Occurring on the heels of an April 30 update to the WHO…
Entering the Mystery: The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness
Emily Waples // Emily Dickinson, we know, did not title her poems. But when Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson set out to publish their first edition of Dickinson’s work in 1890, four years after her death, they took this liberty. What contemporary readers of R.W. Franklin’s edition may now know as poem #760,…
Exit, pursued by a Shark: A Pandemic in Four or More Acts
Emily Waples // Following reports of the President’s coronavirus infection, Twitter was replete with a certain kind of comment, expressing consensus that something—the presidency, the country, the year 2020—had decidedly jumped the shark. A throng of commenters including Dr. Bob Wachter, Chair of the UCSF Department of Medicine—who has tweeted copiously about COVID-19 in an…