Tag: pandemic
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Book review: Pathogenesis: How Germs Made History
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, UK I do not use superlatives lightly, but this is an extraordinary book. It is ambitious in scope and seeks to describe the progress of humanity from earliest times with an emphasis on the role of infectious diseases in our cultural, economic, political, and scientific development. Drawing from disciplines as diverse as…
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Book review: Pandemic Obsession: How They Feature in our Popular Culture
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, UK Following the worldwide COVID pandemic, there has been a plethora of books published on the theme of epidemics and pandemics. Readers may be forgiven if they feel they are now suffering from literary pandemic fatigue. However, this interesting new book sets out to describe how pandemics have influenced literary writing throughout…
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Book review: How the NHS Coped with COVID-19
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom This work is a timely and important contribution to the literature on the COVID-19 pandemic, which has wreaked havoc worldwide. Following the cluster of pneumonia cases of unknown cause in Wuhan, China at the end of 2019, things would never be the same again. In this book, the author has…
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Happy hypoxia
Khyati GuptaMumbai, India Poet’s statement “Happy hypoxia” is a poem I wrote while trying to capture the thoughts of a patient in solitude infected with coronavirus amidst the second wave of the pandemic. Happy hypoxia I wake up at the noise of a tray put next to my bedI know what’s in it even before…
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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…
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COVID-19 and 1665: Learning from Daniel Defoe
Brian BirchSouthampton, Hampshire, UK Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year is an account of the 1665 Great Plague of London. Based on eyewitness experience, the undersigned initials “H. F.” suggest the author’s uncle, Henry Foe, as its primary source. Published in 1722, it stands as the most reliable and comprehensive account of the…
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Ancient Greek plague and coronavirus
Patrick BellBelfast, Northern Ireland Introduction Homer’s Iliad, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, and Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War have been termed “the three earliest, and arguably most influential, representations of the plague in Western narrative.”1 This essay uses these historical sources to examine attitudes toward plague in ancient Greece and parallels in the modern response…
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To wear or not to wear? Attitudes towards mask wearing then and now
Mariella ScerriVictor GrechMellieha, Malta More than a century ago, as the 1918 influenza pandemic raged around the globe, masks of gauze and cheesecloth became the facial frontlines in the battle against the virus. However, in a volatile environment induced by a pandemic, the use of masks also stoked political division. Although medical authorities urged the…