Quarantine Life from Cholera to COVID-19
What Pandemics Teach Us About Parenting, Work, Life, and Communities from the 1700s to Today
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
For readers of Mary Roach and Jared Diamond, an innovative look at the histories of different epidemics and what it meant for society, alongside what lessons different diseases have to teach us as society battles the novel coronavirus.
Throughout history, there have been numerous epidemics that have threatened mankind with destruction. Diseases have the ability to highlight our shared concerns across the ages, affecting every social divide from national boundaries, economic categories, racial divisions, and beyond. Whether looking at smallpox, HIV, Ebola, or COVID-19 outbreaks, we see the same conversations arising as society struggles with the all-encompassing question: What do we do now?
In “poignant yet relevant detail” (Niki Kapsambelis, author of The Inheritance), Quarantine Life from Cholera to COVID-19 demonstrates that these conversations have always involved the same questions of individual liberties versus the common good, debates about rushing new and untested treatments, considerations of whether quarantines are effective to begin with, what to do about healthy carriers, and how to keep trade circulating when society shuts down.
This vibrant social and medical history tracks different diseases and outlines their trajectory, what they meant for society, and societal questions each disease brought up, along with practical takeaways we can apply to current and future pandemics—so we can all be better prepared for whatever life throws our way.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nixon (Kept From All Contagion), a medical humanities professor and self-described "disease-lover," explores past pandemics in this creative if cursory survey. Nixon believes "studying the past will show us how we can craft not only our biological survival... but also how to think ahead," and assembles 30 thought-provoking lessons from historical texts related to pandemics. A look at Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year and Due Preparations for the Plague, for example, yields the idea that "like it or not, we need economies," and thus economic shutdowns should be avoided. Nixon is transparent that Defoe himself was a merchant and likely to have a bias, but never deeply engages with countervailing opinions that might complicate the lesson. Elsewhere, she studies interviews with survivors of the 1918 influenza pandemic and pieces together recreations of their experiences. This leads to the lesson that "the kids are not all right" and an exploration of the impact of school closures on child development. Puzzlingly, though, her recreations don't cover school closures and her supporting research is largely anecdotal. While Nixon believes medical humanities can provide a perspective that allows for discerning when a claim is "actually scientific fact rather than simply a reflection of our own cultural biases," her readings often fall into that very trap. For a history of quarantine, readers can look elsewhere.
