#pandemicreading

After talking with my pseudosister yesterday and having a number of conversations with people the past couple of weeks it has occurred to me that not everyone knows where to start in order to begin to understand what’s going on in the world.  

Full disclosure, I work in arts/theater/nonprofits and am a science aficionado.  I worked my way through a Biology associates degree (took 5 years but I’m proud as fuck that I did it).  I just think science is fascinating.  

I’ve found myself in recent weeks taking leadership roles in terms of helping my less science oriented colleagues and friends make sense of the language disparity between scientists and everyone else.  I will continue doing my best to translate and help people understand but step one seems like making sure that people have access to the same resources that I use. 

How to get Books and Stuff: 

Scribd is great if you can afford it, but doesn’t always have everything.  Always start at your local library (although they might be closed to the public right now, they’re still working to make sure people have access to as many resources as they can offer). 

Libby by Overdrive - Get your local library on your phone!

Scribd.com - free trial and then a subscription service

As always, fuck *mazon.  Get books from literally anywhere else.  Get them from the trash before looking there.  Also, Audible and Goodreads belong to them too.  So fuck them as well.  

Reading List:

*all published before the outbreak and not a part of any pandemic money grabs

Bunk by Kevin Young

Quackery by Lydia Kang

Typhoid Mary by Anthony Bourdain

Poison Squad by Deborah Blum

Rabid by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy

Spillover by David Quammen

The Great Influenza by John M. Barry

The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett

The Viral Storm by Nathan Wolfe

Listening:

Ologies Podcast with Alie Ward

Sawbones with Dr. Sydnee & Justin McElroy

Science Friday from NPR

Science Rules! with Bill Nye

This Week In Virology with Vincent Racaniello - this one can get a little technical

Emerging Infectious Diseases by the CDC

In antebellum Philadelphia riots were endemic, sometimes connected to protest, but mostly they were simply riots. The rioters were all white, and their victims were mostly free Blacks, making these riots a significant expansion of the systemic violence against Black people in America that has continued almost without a break for hundreds of years.

The most famous riot of the period was the burning of Pennsylvania Hall on May 17, 1838. The hall had just been built by the Pennsylvania Abolition Society as a venue for their public meetings, a “temple of free discussion” of antislavery, women’s rights, temperance, and other reforms. Four days after it opened it was torched by a mob, said to have been organized by a group of “gentlemen from a certain section of the country.” What angered the rioters was not only what the speakers said but also the fact that so many of them were women and African Americans, and that Blacks and whites sat together in the audience without separation. The police made no effort to intervene, and the several fire companies that converged on the site refused to fight the fire, instead pointing their hoses at the houses around the hall. In the days that followed rioters also torched the Friends Shelter for Colored Children and damaged the AME Mother Bethel Church.

More about protest, riots, Robert Purvis, California House, Frank Webb's "The Garies," and more on the latest Pandemic Reading from Librarian Jim Green. Now up on the blog at www.librarycompany.org/news

Image 1: J.C. Wild, Pennsylvania Hall, hand-colored lithograph (Philadelphia, 1838). 

Quarantine is not new. In the U.S., quarantine began in response to yellow fever. In 1742, after an outbreak the year before, a quarantine station was opened on Province Island where the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers meet. The 1753 Scull and Heap map shows a “pest house” there, called the Lazaretto. In 1799, after three successive annual outbreaks of fever (that’s not counting the 1793 calamity), the city created a board of health, which built a much larger Lazaretto a few miles farther downstream at Essington, a few hundred yards from what is now the west end of the airport runway. That building still stands.  Librarian Jim Green talks more about the Lazaretto, quarantine, and isolation in his latest Pandemic Reading, now on the blog. 

Image 1: Nicholas Scull and George Heap. A map of Philadelphia and parts adjacent. [S.l.: s.n, 1753] . 

Image 2: By Smallbones, Public Domain

Hardly had the threat of yellow fever begun to recede in the northern part of the U.S. when a new plague emerged that was in some ways even worse: Cholera. Cholera had long been endemic in parts of India, but an outbreak in 1817 spread to China and Indonesia, making it the first cholera pandemic. Millions died. The second pandemic in 1829 spread north to Russia, across Europe, and hit the U.S. in 1832. In New York 3,500 people died that year, but in Philadelphia the death rate was significantly smaller. This was attributed to Philadelphia’s superior water works, which provided plenty of fresh, clean water to cleanse the streets of filth.

 More about cholera, Dr. John Snow, the Broad Street Pump, and modern epidemiology in the latest Pandemic Reading, now on the blog.