medical history 
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5/1/2022
A Century After the First Insulin Injection, It's Time to Make Sure It's Affordable
by Martin Abrahamson and Sanjiv Chopra
The US Senate has the opportunity to honor the legacy of the doctors who pioneered insulin treatment by making sure that everyone who needs this life-saving medicine can afford it.
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SOURCE: Fortune
4/23/2022
Does the Forgotten "Russian Flu" of the 1800s Give Clues How COVID Will Wind Down?
One lesson seems clear: there is no neat two-year timeline for pandemics, and viruses can circulate at a low profile for a long time.
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SOURCE: Smithsonian
4/19/2022
Racism and the 19th Century Yellow Fever Epidemic in New Orleans
by Karin Wulf
Karin Wulf interviews Kathryn Olivarius about her new book on the social and racial factors that prolonged a contagious epidemic that may have killed as many as 150,000 people in New Orleans between 1803 and 1861.
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SOURCE: LitHub
4/20/2022
Historical Novelist Dolen Perkins-Valdez Shares Her Reading List for the History of Medical Racism
"I wrote my newest novel Take My Hand because I believed there were too many people who did not know about the history of forced sterilizations among poor women of color."
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
3/24/2022
The Religious History of Caesarean Surgery and the Abortion Debate
by Elizabeth O'Brien
In the 18th century, priests in Spanish colonies in the Americas were required to perform Caesaran operations on pregnant women whose own lives were beyond saving in order to baptize their fetuses, helping to develop the Catholic doctrine that the unborn already had souls.
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SOURCE: National Geographic
3/4/2022
Historians on the Lessons from 1918's Pandemic Fatigue
Medical historians Nancy Bristow and Thomas Ewing reflect on how public discontent with public health measures has limited the society's capacity to control pandemics.
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SOURCE: Vox
3/4/2022
What Can the History of Antivax Movements Tell Us about the Future of COVID?
Medical historian Nadja Durbach and philosopher Maya Goldenberg explain that challenges posed by vaccine resistance and mistrust of health authorities are not new; the lesson to learn isn't that resistance is inevitable, but that some of the social conflicts supporting it can be addressed.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
3/8/2022
How did this Level of Death Become Normal?
In absolute and relative terms, The United States has fared horribly in the coronavirus pandemic. Historians and social scientists help writer Ed Yong explain why the nation meets mass death with a collective shrug.
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SOURCE: Notches
3/3/2022
Elizabeth Reis on "Bodies in Doubt," Her History of Intersex in America
"People born with bodily differences that fall outside the bounds of “normal” have suffered tremendously, as physicians have tried to “fix” their bodies and their psyches to fit into a narrow conception of acceptability."
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SOURCE: The Conversation
2/10/2022
Was the Black Death Less Severe and Shorter than We Think?
by Adam Izdebski, Alessia Masi and Timothy P. Newfield
"While no two pandemics are the same, the study of the past can help us discover where to look for our own vulnerabilities and how to best prepare for future outbreaks. To begin to do that, though, we need to reassess past epidemics with all the evidence we can."
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2/13/2022
New York Survived the 1832 Cholera Epidemic
by Daniel S. Levy
The 1832 Cholera epidemic roiled New York, terrorizing the city across lines of class and neighborhood. Today, the city's resilience can be a source of encouragement, but also a caution that today's pandemic won't be the last.
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2/13/2022
The First Smallpox Vaccinator in the 1780s Got Abuse Instead of Thanks
by Rod Tanchanco
Benjamin Jesty correctly intuited that exposing himself and his family to cowpox could shield them from the recurrent smallpox pandemics of England. Twenty years ahead of Edward Jenner, he became a local pariah.
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SOURCE: The Nation
2/3/2022
Wishful Thinking on COVID is as Dangerous as Prior Episodes of Denial
by Gregg Gonsalves
A convergence has emerged between the right and the center that the Omicron variant is the last hurrah of the COVID pandemic and a signal to go back to "normal." A public health scholar warns this is potentially sacrificing the vulnerable to the wishes of the powerful.
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SOURCE: NPR
1/1/2022
Black History Month Celebrates Medicine and Health
Marvin Dulaney, president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) says that the racial health disparities highlighted by the pandemic make this year's focus on medical pioneers and health advocates particularly appropriate.
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SOURCE: National Library of Medicine
1/11/2022
National Library of Medicine Announces 2022 History Talks
NLM History Talks promote awareness and use of NLM and related historical collections for research, education, and public service in biomedicine, the social sciences, and the humanities.
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SOURCE: TomDispatch
1/6/2022
What Will We Remember of 2022?
by Tom Engelhardt
The response to the pandemic shows how the contemporary American urge toward nation un-building has returned home.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
1/3/2022
With Omicron, We Need to Understand the 1918 Flu Pandemic More than Ever
by Christopher McKnight Nichols
"It may be that only now, in the winter of 2022, when Americans are exhausted with these mitigation methods, that a comparison to the 1918 pandemic is most apt."
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
12/19/2021
History Can Guide Fixes for America's Abysmal Maternal and Infant Health Outcomes
by Michelle Bezark
The brief history of the U.S. Children's Bureau shows that treating the health of mothers and infants as a national issue can get results.
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12/19/2021
In Critical Ways, the 1918 Flu Remains a Forgotten Pandemic
by George Dehner
The news has made many comparisons between the current pandemic and the 1918 influenza – especially the grim milestones of infections and deaths – but it's clear that lessons about public policy and public health practices based on the failures of the past remain unlearned.
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SOURCE: The Nation
10/14/2021
America as a “Shining City on a Hill”—and Other Myths to Die By
by Gregg Gonsalves
"Our relationship to disease, to pandemics past, is obscured by this myth of fundamental American goodness. If we accept that we are capable of barbarity, official cruelty, these myths shatter and leave us with a national story that is far more complicated to tell, a legacy to work against."
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