11 Nov 2020
Several years ago I had a chance to work on a collection of one of my very favorite comics, The Gumps, by Sidney Smith. In this edition, for the Library of American Comics Essentials series, we collected the year leading up to the tragic death of Mary Gold in 1929, the first comic strip character […]
8 Nov 2020
In my previous post we talked about the ways in which newspaper comic strips—the place in a daily paper, otherwise devoted to world wars and local political debates, that was in 1918 primarily focused on entertainment and humor—engaged with the most devastating pandemic the United States had experienced. In the comic strips, cartoonists sought both […]
5 Apr 2020
[1] See Carol R. Byerly, “The U.S. Military and the Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919,” Public Health Report 125 (2010 ): 82–91.
2 Mar 2020
Common treatments for gout involved elevating the foot to relieve inflammation and wrapping the affected extremities in flannel. The gout stool can be seen in a number of cartoon depictions of gout sufferers.
1 Feb 2020
As we have written about elsewhere at this site, the resurgence of xenophobic editorial cartoons in the wake of a new global disease is pretty close to a sure bet. The latest health emergency, the rise of the novel coronavirus, is of course no exception. It was identified first in Wuhan in China, ultimately linked […]
27 Jan 2020
I first encountered Emi Gennis in The Plunge (2016), a harrowing and ultimately gutting account of the attempt of Annie Edson Taylor to go over the Niagara Falls in a barrel in 1901. I was impressed by the incredibly lively and cartooning, the extensive research that had obviously gone into the book, and with the storytelling […]
20 Jan 2020
This grows out of a talk I first gave at the American Association for the History of Medicine Conference in Columbus in April, 2019. On October 30, I had the opportunity to give an expanded version for the Heberden Society History of Medicine Lecture series at the New York Academy of Medicine. I am immensely […]
15 Jan 2020
Before its eradication in 1980, smallpox was one of the reigning kings of deadly diseases. It is estimated that smallpox claimed 400,000 lives a year in 18th-century Europe and an estimated total of 300-500 million in the 20th century. The disease left survivors with extensive, disfiguring scars and left a third of survivors blind. Smallpox […]
7 Dec 2019
President Eisenhower succeeded Truman as President, bringing the White House back into GOP hands for the first time in twenty years. Eisenhower strongly opposed socialized healthcare, favoring instead a system of private and employer-based insurance. Following the failure of the Truman-backed plan, the system of health insurance we have now grew under the care of […]
8 Feb 2021
Women Missing from Clinical Trials
Before the establishment of the Office of Research on Women’s Health (ORWH) in September 1990, women’s health research was not prioritized by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The organization is the “largest public funder of biomedical research in the world,” according to their website, in addition to acting as the U.S. government’s primary agent […]
More