Atlantic Antidote: Race, Gender, and the Birth of the First Vaccine
In 1804, the Spanish Crown introduced the smallpox vaccine to its empire, where vaccination was voluntary and where consent was a natural right ceded to parents. Despite these ostensible protections, authorities relied on enslaved, Indigenous, and other dispossessed bodies to incubate and reproduce the live vaccine and transport it across the empire. Analyzing this set of historical relations, Dr. Yero will ask what consent meant for parents and for children who were compelled to navigate epidemic disease, new means of prevention, but also the unequal structures of power that worked to narrowly define both freedom and moth...
Source: Videocast - All Events - December 17, 2021 Category: General Medicine Tags: Upcoming Events Source Type: video

Narratives of Pandemics Past: Archival Approaches to Understanding the COVID-19 Pandemic
The last two years have produced a new fascination with historical epidemic moments. This pandemic of COVID-19 has required us all to become conversant in epidemiology, fields of public health and also histories of medicine. From the 1918/-1920 Influenza pandemic to smallpox and polio eradication campaigns to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, journalists, social scientists and historians have sought historical analogues to our present pandemic moment. Archives have been a critical lens into understanding our current moment. Drawing on material from the U.S. National Library of Medicine as well has his own research on the history of i...
Source: Videocast - All Events - December 9, 2021 Category: General Medicine Tags: Upcoming Events Source Type: video

Research Symposium: Reporting, Recording, and Remembering the 1918 Influenza Epidemic
A public research symposium involving Virginia Tech students studying the history of data in social context through individual and collaborative primary-source research at the National Library of Medicine and elsewhere, and as part of their course Topics in the History of Data in Social Context, being taught by Dr. E. Thomas Ewing, Virginia Tech Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Research Professor. During the symposium, the students will present their research on various aspects of the 1918 pandemic, including newspaper reporting at the peak of the epidemic (late September to early November 1918), contemporary social ...
Source: Videocast - All Events - April 10, 2020 Category: General Medicine Tags: Upcoming Events Source Type: video

Research Symposium: Mortality Statistics during the 1918 Influenza Epidemic
A public research symposium involving Virginia Tech students studying the history of data in social context through individual and collaborative primary-source research at the National Library of Medicine and elsewhere. During the symposium, the students will present their research on various aspects of the 1918 pandemic, including newspaper reporting at the peak of the epidemic (late September to early November 1918), contemporary social distancing policies and procedures, and how contemporaries determined that the epidemic was ending, and how they remembered the remarkable experience of this intense, but brief, crisis in...
Source: Videocast - All Events - April 9, 2020 Category: General Medicine Tags: Upcoming Events Source Type: video

The Mother (of all Pandemics) and Her Naughty Children: 100 Years of Behaving Badly
Writing in his diary on September 27, 1918, Charles Corning, former mayor of Concord, New Hampshire, described how flu was blazing through his corner of the world “ as fire shrivels the fields, laying out communities and taking a toll of death unprecedented. ” The next day, he observed, “ A heavy sense of anxiety and apprehension like a dismal cloud in midsummer weighs heavily upon us because of the deadly ravages of the so-called Spanish influenza. Funerals jostle one another so the sable procession goes on. ” That sable procession would eventually claim 167 lives in Concord and at least 50 million more around the...
Source: Videocast - All Events - April 3, 2018 Category: General Medicine Tags: Upcoming Events Source Type: video