Despite its infamy as a “show about nothing,” Seinfeld’s “Junior Mint” (1993) episode is emphatically about medicine—medical knowledge, the medical world, medical “miracles”. More specifically, it centers on how the ‘general population’ receives medical knowledge. Interwoven subplots caricature the routes through which information about the body’s illnesses and healings pass into what we might call…
Tag: history of public health
Colonial Lit(t)eraria: Topographies of Purity and Pollution on the Bank of the Ganga
Is there a link between the histories of the sanitation of the Hooghly and the formation of a discourse of sanitary womanhood in colonial Calcutta? The river in question, Hooghly or Ganga, was the epitome of pollution for the British while being synonymous with purity for the colonized Hindu. The historian Pratik Chakrabarti makes an…
Gay Men and Lesbians, Alcohol Addiction, and the 1970s
John A. Carranza // In 2018, I wrote a piece on Oliver Sipple, the gay man who foiled an assassination attempt on President Gerald Ford. In the aftermath of that attempt, Sipple’s life, including his sexuality, became public. In the years since he stopped the assassination his drinking had increased, which exacerbated some of the…