Amanda Cachia’s Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism was published by Manchester University Press last September. Cachia is a curator and art historian with a joint appointment as Professor of Practice in Museum Studies at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, where she is also Affiliate Faculty in Disability Studies….
Tag: COVID-19
Good Vibes Only?: Medieval Plague Tracts and the Powers (and Limits) of Positive Thinking in a Pandemic
When the first waves of the Black Death struck Europe in the fourteenth century, the last thing likely to be on anyone’s mind was staying cheerful; yet overwhelmingly, this is the advice that contemporary physicians gave. Medieval plague treatises explained that dwelling excessively on the horrors of the plague and thoughts of death could actually…
Book Review: Ohio Under Covid – Lessons from America’s Heartland in Crisis
Despite the incredible loss, turmoil, and uncertainty wrought by Covid-19, life has seemingly returned to “normal”. Federal (CDC) and global (UN) health agencies have declared an end to the public health emergency, and many of us have returned to work, gone back to school, and now interact without masks or social distancing. The media no…
Everyday Disaster Ethics
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…
Healthcare is Human: Creative Responses to COVID-19 from Martinsburg, West Virginia
(Photo above: Molly Humphries) It’s not a stretch to say that we are all still grappling with COVID. From a biomedical standpoint, though we have ways of staving off and managing the disease, we are still seeing daily deaths in numbers high enough for there to be ongoing concerns. New strains proliferate through countries even…
The Road Not Taken: Thinking Beyond Vaccines
Tianyuan Huang// Truth be told, I did not see this coming. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, I thought I would have been conducting dissertation research in Tokyo for nearly half a year by now; but I am still in New York City awaiting the lifting of travel bans, having already rescheduled flight tickets for the third…
Seasonal Time, Variant Time: Pandemic Futurity
Julia Dauer // Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists have speculated about whether cases will ebb and flow in seasonal patterns. Just this week, NPR released a podcast episode about the anticipated intersections of flu and COVID-19 in the U.S. this winter. The episode encapsulates the collision between two conflicting ways of conceptualizing illness: seasonal time…
Vaccine Hesitancy and Pregnancy: How the Medical Humanities Can Help
Dr. Sam Allen Wright // Four days before I saw a faint second line on a pregnancy test, I got my first COVID vaccine. I knew that I could be pregnant when I got the shot. In fact, that’s why I wanted the vaccine so badly; I knew that COVID caused increased risks for pregnant…
Ode on a Greek Letter
April Sharp // The fifteenth letter of the Greek alphabet is currently in the spotlight, but for all the wrong reasons. On November 26th, 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) designated the SARS-CoV-2 variant B.1.1.529 as a variant of concern and gave it the label Omicron. The use of the Greek alphabet to label variants…
Collapsing Work-Life Balance in Covid-19
Amala Poli // The beep of the phone.. thudding heart, fingers clicking away. “Is everything okay?” Yes, you say. “I just had to reply to this one email. All done now!” You set it aside, eyes flickering in the direction of the screen just a little.