In her 2005 poetic essay “The Pain Scale,” author Eula Biss challenges the conception of medicalized pain rating systems. She describes how pain ranked at “0” or “10” seems unfathomable, given the impossibility of representing pain’s absolute absence or its “worst imaginable” presence (Biss 30). She also critiques how patients often succumb to the “tyranny…
Tag: Nursing
Nursing, Social Drama, and the Coronavirus Pandemic
John A. Carranza // Coronavirus, or COVID-19, has disrupted daily life for people around the world as medical experts, scientists, and nations rush to halt the spread of this virus. In the United States, Americans have put their lives on hold to practice social distancing and quarantine when infected. Grocery store employees, delivery service workers,…
Medicine in the Archive: Exploring Feminism and Nursing
John A. Carranza // Being a historian comes with no better rite of passage than to enter the archive. Regardless of the time period or topic chosen by the researcher, sorting through the documents is exciting for me because I am able to engage in an imaginative and interpretative exercise where I consider why a…
Notes from the Frontline: When Death Becomes Routine (Part 1)
David Thomas Peacock // I wasn’t prepared for so much death. Before I became an emergency room nurse, I worked on a neurology unit with stroke patients. I loved that job. I gained a lot of clinical knowledge from my colleagues, but I learned even more about what it means to be a human faced…
Stability and Care: Establishing the Santa Rosa Infirmary in a Frontier City
By 1866, the Civil War had ended in the United States, and the country underwent a turbulent period of transformation known as Reconstruction. Presidential and Congressional Reconstruction set the terms for the South’s readmission into the Union, which included among its requirements: oaths of loyalty, inclusion of African Americans in politics, and the creation of…