Tag: Edward McSweegan
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Jack London’s cloudy crystal ball
Edward McSweeganKingston, Rhode Island, United States The COVID-19 pandemic has given quarantined readers new opportunities to discover the literature of plagues and epidemics. Many people—in order to give context to the present pandemic—have turned to books like Albert Camus’ classic novel The Plague, Daniel DeFoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, Steven King’s The Stand,…
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Mary Niles and the Canton rats
Edward McSweeganKinston, Rhode Island, United States Bubonic plague arrived in Honolulu in December 1899. A month later it had spread to San Francisco, where the infection caused a series of deadly outbreaks until 1907.1 But for decades before plague reached the American west coast, it had burned through rural China. By 1893, the plague reached…
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African American contract doctors in the military
Edward McSweeganKingston, Rhode Island, United States In the spring of 1898, the United States rushed into a war with Spain but lacked adequate troops, training, weapons, transport, supplies, food, landing craft, and medical personnel. One deficit that could be corrected before the shooting started was the lack of doctors. George Sternberg, the Army Surgeon General,…
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The Schoolhouse Lab
Edward McSweeganKingston, Rhode Island, United States “Black measles” was a common name for spotted fever, which regularly killed people in the western United States. Symptoms included a spotty rash on the extremities, fever, chills, headache, and photophobia. No one knew what caused it. The first recorded case in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley was in 1873.1 Twenty-three…
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Dr. Avery, Medicine Woman
Edward McSweeganKingston, Rhode, Island, United States In July 1878, astronomers headed into the American West to observe a total eclipse of the sun. Among them was America’s only woman astronomer, Maria Mitchell of Vassar College, and four of her former astronomy students. Lacking the federal support and discounted railroad tickets of her male colleagues, Mitchell…