Circulating Now welcomes guest blogger Cynthia Connolly. Dr. Connolly is Associate Professor of Nursing at the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. She is a pediatric nurse and historian. She studies the history of children’s health and social welfare policy and practice in the […]
Tag Archives: disease
July
06
Leprosy in India, ca. 1931
posted by Circulating Now
Circulating Now welcomes guest blogger Magnus Vollset. Dr. Vollset is a researcher at the University of Bergen, Norway, and holds a PhD in medical history from the same institution. Leprosy in India [Lepra in India in the original German] is a hard film to watch. In the course of its 12 minutes, it puts before […]
August
20
Emmy Immunity
posted by Circulating Now
By Sarah Eilers It’s August. Students are facing summer’s end and the start of another school year. Parents are scrambling to arrange physical and dental checkups, and pediatricians’ offices are deluged with immunization forms. The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has nearly 200 cataloged films about vaccination and immunization. One recent acquisition features a pigtailed […]
November
03
The Story of Wendy Hill
posted by Circulating Now
By Sarah Eilers The Story of Wendy Hill, 1949 A “fine and wholesome” young woman, newly married, steps into the street below the office where she works as a secretary in small-town Greendale. A car appears and slows to a stop. She looks, pauses, then hurries into the road. Suddenly a truck barrels toward her, […]
March
26
Celebrating Salk
posted by circulating now
By Ginny A. Roth In this black and white photograph from the 1950s, a nurse stands by while Jonas Salk inoculates a young girl with the polio vaccine via injection to the arm. Poliomyelitis (Polio), a disease that attacks the nervous system and causes paralysis, was a widespread epidemic in the United States during the […]
March
24
TB: A Killer Then, A Killer Now
posted by Circulating Now
By Sarah Eilers Peter Borik: The Story of the Tragedy He Brought His Family, 1944 In the mid-20th century, U.S. public health authorities used a variety of means to inform, cajole, and even frighten the population into testing and treatment for tuberculosis (TB), a bacterial infection that attacks the lungs. A century ago, TB was […]
March
17
Famine Ships
posted by Circulating Now
By Stephen J. Greenberg Ireland is a beautiful country, but it is a haunted one as well. Invasions, civil wars, massacres, religious and political repression, terrorism and counter-terrorism, famine, disease, forced emigration: all mar her history with a doleful regularity. But there can be no doubt that the greatest scar on the national memory is […]
