Dreams etc

Obvs not all access is wheelchair access I'm just a wheelchair user so hence it centring around wheelchair access

(Inspired by Ruth Martin on Insta go check them out they're super cool and amazing)

1. there will always be someone more severely affected by their disability than you are, this does not mean you aren't disabled, or that your struggles aren't real. these disabled people are not your enemy.

2. visibly disabled people are not treated better than invisibly disabled people, there are different struggles to both.

3. visibly & severely disabled people are not lucky for being visibly disabled or severely disabled. this belief is ableist.

4. we all need to keep the more severely disabled people in mind, they are the most vulnerable & this is disability justice 101.

5. there will always be severely disabled people in public, you absolutely need to work on your discomforts about the conditions/aids/symptoms/behaviours they might have; drooling, incontinence, "odd" behaviours, visible differences, use of AAC etc. this is a you problem, not a them problem.

6. there will always be symptoms of disabilities that you don't approve of; zero social awareness, cognitive impairments, violent meltdowns, strong smells & loud noises, being nonverbal/semiverbal etc. no one can force you to like it, but you cannot be cruel to them regardless of your opinions, again, this is a you problem & not a them problem.

7. you can still be ableist even if you yourself are disabled, this isn't always internalised, it can also be outright ableism.

8. caregivers of severely disabled people often play an important role in disability spaces, try not to *immediately* discount their experiences, unless they're truly over stepping, are being factually incorrect/uneducated or ableist. (caregivers can come with unique problems in disability spaces, 100%, but they are not inherently bad)

9. severely disabled people will have experiences you do not have, it is not an attack on you when these experiences are talked about.

10. “people wouldn’t say [ableist thing] to a wheelchair user” yes they would and yes they do.

Here’s a bunch of disability related books, fiction and non fiction, into a few categories!

Physical Disability:

Out on a Limb by Hannah Bonam-Young

Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

Yours Until Dawn by Teresa Medeiros

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Palomino by Danielle Steel

The Year We Fell Down by Sarina Bowen

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk

The Chemistry Test by Georgina Frankie

How to Walk Away by Katherine Center

The Silence by Tim Lebbon

Nestlings by Nat Cassidy

The Sign for Home by Blair Fell

Intellectual/Developmental Disability:

That's Not How It Happened by Craig Thomas

The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards

Summer Reading by Jenn McKinlay

The Sideways Life of Denny Voss by Holly Kennedy

Anything for You by Kristan Higgins

Keeping Lucy by T. Greenwood

Unloved by Peyton Corinne

The Frederick Sisters Are Living the Dream by Jeannie Zusy

Census by Jesse Ball

Chronic/Terminal Illness:

Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert

The Matzah Ball by Jean Meltzer

Salty, Spiced, and A Little Bit Nice by Cynthia Timoti

So Lucky by Nicola Griffith

Afterglow by Emily Antoinette

Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors

Close Enough to Touch by Colleen Oakley

Handle with Care by Jodi Picoult

Something to Talk About by Meryl Wilsner

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

Inside the O'Briens by Lisa Genova

Fangirl Down by Tessa Bailey

The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton

It's All in Your Head by Sabina Nordqvist

Head Over Heels by Jill Shalvis

Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

Mental Illness:

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Interesting Facts about Space by Emily R. Austin

The Music of Bees by Eileen Garvin

Everything Here Is Beautiful by Mira T. Lee

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Yes & I Love You by Roni Loren

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily R. Austin

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

The Girls at 17 Swann Street by Yara Zgheib

Autism/ADD/ADHD:

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang

Outlier by Susie Tate

Miracle Creek by Angie Kim

Upward Bound by Woody Brown

Only Here, Only Now by Tom Newlands

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

The Outside by Ada Hoffmann

The Mistletoe Motive by Chloe Liese

Perfectly Adequate by Jewel E. Ann

Lizzie Blake's Best Mistake by Mazey Eddings

You Weren't Meant to Be Human by Andrew Joseph White

Non-Fiction Disability Books:

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century by Alice Wong

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity by Devon Price

Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body by Rebekah Taussig

Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist by Judith Heumann, Kristen Joiner

What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo

Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

What Doesn't Kill You: A Life with Chronic Illness - Lessons from a Body in Revolt by Tessa Miller

The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O'Rourke

Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me by Ellen Forney

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay

Nujeen: One Girl's Incredible Journey from War-torn Syria in a Wheelchair by Nujeen Mustafa, Christina Lamb

Sociopath by Patric Gagne

Unseen: How I Lost My Vision but Found My Voice by Molly Burke

Madness: A Bipolar Life by Marya Hornbacher

Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space by Amanda Leduc

Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

My Body Is Not a Prayer Request: Disability Justice in the Church by Amy Kenny

Feminist, Queer, Crip by Alison Kafer

Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to Be an Ally by Emily Ladau

Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law by Haben Girma

a poem about a post-mortem conversation with my abuela, as inspired by the poem “After a few beers, my uncle asks me how” by Todd Dillard. transcription under the cut.

It is a shame to fight over terminology, especially when there is a perfectly accurate and precise term that could be used: personal collections. Not only is “personal collections” more accurate, in my experience it also draws students’ attention to a number of questions that they don’t ask about the term “archive.” When I discuss personal or special collections with students, they begin asking questions that “archive” does not inspire, such as: Collected by whom? Collected why? For what purpose? These are the questions we are trying to teach as historians.

There's a lot of confusion about different "poxes" in this post (which wasn't my intention, and now I feel bad), so here's a general overview (also, obligatory apology for messiness, this was written at like 1 AM):

Smallpox:

Smallpox, caused by variola virus, was a massive problem historically. It existed in the Western hemisphere for thousands of years (genetic evidence of smallpox has been found in Egyptian mummies from ≈1500 BCE, but it was probably around long before then), and it was introduced to the New World during the Columbian exchange, which had devastating consequences for indigenous populations (which were already suffering from colonialist violence, which made epidemics much worse than they already would've been). Historically, smallpox had a case fatality rate between 30-50%, and survivors were often left disfigured or permanently disabled (you've probably seen pictures of smallpox scars, but smallpox can also cause blindness and other complications). Importantly, smallpox only affects humans—it has no animal hosts—which is why it's one of the few infectious diseases to have been completely eradicated. As of May 8, 1980, it officially no longer exists outside of certain designated American and Russian laboratories. (There are, however, concerns that it could be used as a bioweapon, which is why the government still stockpiles smallpox vaccines and antivirals. I wrote my bioethics term paper on this exact issue, and incidentally, it's one of the major reasons why I believe that STEM majors should take ethics courses!)

There were two strains of variola virus: variola major and variola minor. Variola major was much more dangerous, with a much higher mortality rate; variola minor typically didn't cause severe disease. Fortunately, infection with one strain conferred immunity against the other. Both strains are now eradicated. (People sometimes confuse variola minor with other viruses like cowpox and horsepox, but they're different things.)

There were four clinical forms of smallpox: ordinary (classic smallpox, associated with the rash you usually see in pictures), modified (less severe, often occurred in vaccinated people who got infected anyway), malignant (caused a flat rash instead of the usual pustules, associated with immune dysfunction, almost always fatal), and hemorrhagic (caused severe bleeding, and also near-universally fatal.) All of the non-ordinary forms could be difficult to diagnose because they looked so different from typical smallpox. The less serious "modified" form was often confused with chickenpox, and the hemorrhagic form was sometimes assumed to be a completely different disease. Occasionally, historical sources will refer to hemorrhagic smallpox as "black pox," with or without an understanding that it's caused by the same virus as ordinary smallpox.

Other relevant viruses:

Cowpox, caused by cowpox virus (an orthopoxvirus similar to smallpox) causes mild disease in cows, humans, and several other animals. Infection with cowpox virus confers immunity to variola—Edward Jenner noticed this relationship and used material from cowpox lesions to inoculate people against smallpox.

Vaccinia virus, another orthopoxvirus, is the source of the modern smallpox vaccine. It's closely related to both cowpox and horsepox (weirdly, it's actually closer to horsepox), but it's distinct enough to be its own species. Infection usually causes mild symptoms, and, of course, confers immunity to smallpox.

Chickenpox is an entirely different thing. It's caused by the varicella-zoster virus, which is a herpesvirus, not a poxvirus at all! Infection with varicella-zoster does not confer immunity to smallpox or any other poxvirus—chickenpox is from a totally different family.

So why are the names so weird and confusing? Why is everything about all of this so weird and confusing?

There are multiple reasons for this, so bear with me.

Historically, a "pox" was any disease that caused a bumpy rash of pustles/blisters. Chickenpox, smallpox, and the other "poxes" all cause superficially similar rashes—thus the similar names. (Even though we know now that chickenpox comes from a completely different family, this wouldn't have been apparent before the dawn of modern medicine.)

Smallpox was given that name to differentiate it from syphilis, which was known as the "great pox" when it first appeared in Europe. (Fun[?] microbiology fact: There are debates about the origins of syphilis, but the most common theory holds that it originated in the New World, and Christopher Columbus brought it back to Spain. In that way, it's kind of the inverse of smallpox.) Historically, smallpox was also known by a variety of other names in different European, Asian, and African cultures. Again, this gets murky, because historical physicians sometimes struggled to distinguish between similar-looking-but-different diseases.

Other poxviruses are often named after the animals in which they were first identified. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, though, and it can sometimes be misleading (for example, monkeypox virus was first discovered in laboratory monkeys, but it more often affects rodents and other small mammals. The disease formerly known as "monkeypox" was recently renamed "mpox" because the name wasn't accurate.) Also, some poxviruses aren't named after animals at all! It's a weird and inconsistent system (but a lot of virus names are kinda weird and inconsistent).

Related to the above: We don't even know where the name "chickenpox" comes from. I mean, we know it was called a "pox" because it causes a pox-y rash, but we don't know where the "chicken" part originated. There are multiple theories about this, none of which are definitive. The disease itself has nothing to do with chickens.

Basically, a lot of the weirdness is a result of historical naming practices—people identified and named these diseases before modern virology existed, and those names stuck, so now we have similar names for superficially-similar-but-ultimately-different viruses, and names whose origins have been completely lost to time. Later, virologists muddied the waters further by naming newly-discovered poxviruses after the animals in which they were first seen, even when these animals aren't natural hosts or reservoirs of those viruses. It's a mess! And, again, all of this is complicated by the fact that some of these diseases were very hard to diagnose (or distinguish from one another) before modern medicine existed. Now, we can sequence viral DNA and figure out what's actually going on—which viruses caused which symptoms, whether those viruses were closely related, and whether being infected with one disease conferred immunity to another—but historical doctors and scientists didn't have those tools, so they were doing they best they could with very limited information, and that led to a lot of weirdness in terms of how these viruses were named and classified. Our current system inherited some of that weirdness, so here we are.

TL;DR: Poxvirus names are messy. Smallpox is caused by variola virus, which has two strains: variola major (the more severe one) and variola minor (less severe). Cowpox and vaccinia are different viruses in the same family, and being infected with one of them confers immunity to smallpox. Chickenpox isn't a poxvirus at all, but a herpesvirus—it just happens to cause a pockmark-y rash that looks superficially similar to smallpox pustules (and mild forms of smallpox were historically confused with chickenpox).

(P.S. none of this is super relevant to the average person, so don't feel bad if you didn't know any of it. Unless you are a history major inventing new conspiracies about smallpox, in which case you definitely should feel bad.)

Sources & further reading under the cut!

I made a new flyer for my research project 📋

LINK TO THE SURVEY

The survey will be open until at least the end of 2026 if not beyond. Only these 14 measurements are required, all the others are optional:

If you have been on HRT for at least 3 years, have half an hour and a measuring tape, consider taking the survey!

If you don't qualify or don't feel up to participating feel free to share it :)

So I forge him a new breastplate and on the inside, because I know he has plenty of room, I put a little pocket. Not big enough to hold anything functional of course. Just a little extra piece to see what he’ll do with it.

and everyone is posting their 4th of july manis

except this year its very few american flags and red white and blue and stars.

and a LOT of pond scum inspiration