Disease and Society in History Dana Simmons

Dana Simmons speaks with three undergraduate students in HIST 107: Disease and Society, who are Emergency Room technicians and scribes working at the Riverside County Hospital Moreno Valley and the Anaheim Regional Hospital. Chenhao Li, Evan Ashcraft and Shayan Akhavon share their personal histories, experiences and perspectives on the future, coming out of the worst months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

When we start to study the history of disease, we realize that biology and society cannot be separated. Back in the 18th century, important people decided that the study of life and living things should be divided up into different fields. Biologists would study the processes of life, and historians and their ilk would study the facts in the acts of man, since back then, they were mostly interested in men. If there's one thing we're learning today, urgently and painfully, it is that the proce...

Disease played a central role in shaping the colonial order. Medicine and disease were sites of conflicts, contradictions, encounters, rivalries and power within colonial empires. Boosters of empire pointed to Western medicine to justify the ‘white man’s burden’ to occupy and rule over others. They described the tropical colonial world as dangerous, primitive and putrid, ripe for disease. Colonial subjects were viewed as carriers of disease and danger, which must be contained. Symptoms of sle...

Over the course of the sixteenth century, some 90% of indigenous people in the Americas died. Many deaths occurred right at the start of European colonial occupation, but most – the worst – occurred a generation or two later, after indigenous peoples had already been weakened by European conquest, violence and starvation. Waves of disease traveled across the Americas: smallpox, measles, Salmonella, malaria, yellow fever, cholera…. So many indigenous people of the Americas died in the sixteent...

I have been obsessed over the past few days by a dry and brilliant book by historian Bruce Campbell, entitled The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late Medieval World. Each word in that title is meaningful. The Great Transition was an irreversible transformation in human societies and ecologies across Eurasia, which took hold in the 1340s-1370s. Three factors interacted to tip the balance of humans and nature: climate change, social instability and the bubonic plague.The ...

Viruses have history. Virus history is deep history, older than the history written in books. Virus history is older than human history, older than the history of disease, older than the history of all living organisms and possibly as old as the history of life on earth.Readings:Luis Villareal, “Are Viruses Alive?” Scientific American December 2004, 291(6): 100-105. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26060805Carl Zimmer, “Ancient Viruses are Buried in Your DNA,” New York Times October 4, 2017...