Category: Covid-19
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An emergency nurse in the time of Covid
Kimberly TranchitaChicago, Illinois, United States April 2020 I hug my family and leave for work in the ED. No cars on the road. I stop at McDonald’s to get my free “frontline worker” cup of coffee. I no longer bring my own coffee or anything else to work in an attempt to limit the germs…
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Remembering your COVID birth
Laura KahnChicago, IL The thing about having your first baby at the beginning of a pandemic is that everything seems equally strange, because you don’t have a prior kid for comparison. I wait anxiously for my son to poop, I wear a mask when I leave the house, I sanitize everything, I wake every hour—it…
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A pandemic of emotions: Navigating vaccine hesitancy in a post-pandemic world
Nidhi Bhaskar Providence, Rhode Island Photo by CDC on Pexels Four years before the COVID-19 pandemic, I was registering community members at a local health fair. An elderly man in line mentioned that he would never receive a flu shot because his healthy cousin had died of an aneurysm after receiving one. I spoke…
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Review: The History of the World in 100 Pandemics, Plagues and Epidemics
Arpan BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom The publication of this book could not have been better timed. The book sets out to show how pandemics, epidemics, and infectious diseases have shaped human history over the last 5,000 years. Its contents help us place the current COVID-19 epidemic in its rightful historical context. Famine, war, and pestilence have…
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“An ounce of prevention”: past and present
Jack E. RiggsMorgantown, West Virginia, United States Donald R. NewcomerGlendale, Arizona, United States Being old and lame of my Hands, and thereby uncapable of assisting my Fellow Citizens, when their Houses are on Fire; I must beg them to take in good Part the following Hints . . . In the first Place, as an…
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The history of polio and cigarettes, and the need for a COVID-19 vaccine mandate
Daniel GelfmanIndianapolis, Indiana, United States Depicted in this display (Picture 1) at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia are technologic marvels. The first is a box that contained early vials of Dr. Salk’s formalin inactive polio vaccine (with supplementary irradiation). The second is a matchbook, originally invented in the 1890s, that made another technologic marvel…
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The year gross anatomy faced the scalpel
Michael DenhamNew York, New York, United States As the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in early 2020, anatomy departments across the United States struggled to develop contingency plans to continue training the country’s future physicians. Would this year’s class of 22,239 medical students be the first in American history who could not learn gross anatomy on cadavers?…
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The Call of the Wild and COVID-19
Liam ButchartStony Brook, New York, United StatesSamantha RizzoWashington DC, United States The COVID-19 pandemic has wrought a terrible toll upon all of us and has brought the medical system—and the providers who inhabit it—to its knees. There is a tradition in medicine, following Sir William Osler’s “Aequinimitas,” of compassionate detachment: as physicians or trainees, we…