Quarantine Life from Cholera to COVID-19: What Pandemics Teach Us About Parenting, Work, Life, and Communities from the 1700s to Today

by Kari Nixon

Overview

For readers of Mary Roach and Jared Diamond, an innovative look at the histories of different epidemics and what it meant for society, alongside what lessons different diseases have to teach us as society battles the novel coronavirus.

Throughout history, there have been numerous epidemics that have threatened mankind with destruction. Diseases have the ability to highlight our shared concerns across the ages, affecting every social divide from national boundaries, economic categories, racial divisions, and beyond. Whether looking at smallpox, HIV, Ebola, or COVID-19 outbreaks, we see the same conversations arising as society struggles with the all-encompassing question: What do we do now?

In “poignant yet relevant detail” (Niki Kapsambelis, author of The Inheritance), Quarantine Life from Cholera to COVID-19 demonstrates that these conversations have always involved the same questions of individual liberties versus the common good, debates about rushing new and untested treatments, considerations of whether quarantines are effective to begin with, what to do about healthy carriers, and how to keep trade circulating when society shuts down.

This vibrant social and medical history tracks different diseases and outlines their trajectory, what they meant for society, and societal questions each disease brought up, along with practical takeaways we can apply to current and future pandemics—so we can all be better prepared for whatever life throws our way.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982172473
Publisher:	S&S/Simon Element
Publication date:	06/15/2021
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Kari Nixon is a professor specializing in social reactions to infectious diseases. She works at Whitworth University, where she teaches about social responses to contagion and quarantine in medical humanities and Victorian literature courses. Her work on public health has been published for lay audiences in HuffPost, YES! Magazine, and CNN. Her academic book, Kept from All Contagion: Germ Theory, Disease, and the Dilemma of Human Contact, was published by SUNY University Press, and tracks the social history of humankind’s responses to disease in Victorian literature and popular culture. She regularly teaches about zombies, medical ethics, the problematic pressures on the health care system, and social justice issues for marginalized races and genders. She has edited numerous books on diseases in society.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction xv

1 #Listen To Women

Smallpox, Vaccines, and the World before Germs (1721) 1

2 Risky Business

The Question of Keeping Nations Thriving While People Die (1722) 18

3 Let's Stick Together

How Cholera Shaped the Way We Understand Community (1832, 1848, and 1854) 54

4 Wash Your Hands

Sanitation Campaigns throughout History (ca. 1845-1875) 68

5 Germs, Germs Everywhere

How Discovering Bacteria Saved Humanity-and How It Might Destroy Us (1875-1901) 85

Interlude: The Anti-Chapter 105

6 Desperate Remedies and Dangerous Cures throughout History

How Risk Aversion Paradoxically Leads to Risky Behaviors (1875-3901) 120

7 An Ethics Debate for the Ages

American Individualism and the Dilemma of the Healthy Carrier (1906) 133

8 The Kids Are Not All Right

When Diseases Like the 1918 Influenza Pandemic Take the Young (1918) 149

9 The Great Social Leveler

How STDs Called Privileges Bluff (and How the Mew Coronavirus Will Call Ours, Too) (1885 and 1985) 173

10 The Hot Zone

How One Author Launched an Ebola Fear Campaign That Still Hinders Pandemic Containment Today (1994) 194

Conclusion

COVID-19's Darkest Timeline (and How to Reverse Course) 209

Bibliography 221

Index 263

Editorial Reviews

Lest we forget the lessons of our past, Kari Nixon reminds us—in poignant yet relevant detail—that we’ve been here before, and, more important, we can find our way out.” —Niki Kapsambelis, author of The Inheritance: A Family on the Front Lines of the Battle Against Alzheimer’s Disease

“A brilliant look at the history of humanity through the lens of disease, this book is a must-read for anyone who has found depths of resilience and determination in this pandemic (and that’s all of us). Smart, accessible and downright funny, Nixon’s Quarantine Life presents an in-depth archive of our collective past in order to better illuminate who we will be beyond just survivors of a pandemic. Her words make us reflect our own self-prioritization and adaptability, and, most important, have us believing we will come out of this better than when we entered.” —Aparna Shewakramani, TV personality

“I’ve interviewed over three hundred scientists for my show and read nothing but science books. Never have I met someone whose incredibly distinctive work became so serendipitously relevant and important at such a specific moment in time. Kari packed a wonderful overview of three hundred years’ worth of literary accounts from humans impacted by various pathogens through modern history and mixed it perfectly with modern science to give us much-needed historical perspective on the present while providing balanced views on COVID and other current diseases and, perhaps
even more important, a clearer outlook on the inevitable future. Whether you’re into history, literature, or science, or just want to better understand the many frustrating and seemingly counterintuitive responses contemporary humans are having while experiencing their first pandemic . . . this is a book centuries in the making that is a must-read today.” —Shane Mauss, host of the podcast Here We Are

" But Quarantine Life is not aimed at an academic audience. It includes disease history and the lessons of past pandemics, depictions of pandemics in literature, personal observations about the pandemic politics of the moment, and takeaway lessons from past mistakes and successes. The chief merit of the book is its readability—it is never less than engaging, as Nixon shifts between subjects and styles." —Shawn Vestal, The Spokesman-Review

From the Publisher

2021-05-18
A breezy take on plagues and peoples by a writer with a “disease fascination.”

Nixon, a professor of medical humanities, scans history to find support for a series of tweet-ish theses: “Listen. To. Women.” “Contagion is community.” “The kids are not all right.” There are worthy if obvious points throughout. The author, a mother of two, worries about when schools will reopen and what the benchmark for that will be: “And I mean an evidence-based benchmark, not simply a choice made because we’re tired of being careful.” She is also good at holding up a mirror to social norms that deserve to be remade, including our willingness to overlook the bad things of the world, including plagues and famine, as long as they’re not happening to us, and the American tendency to be driven by fear. On the latter point, Nixon rightly observes that if we are truly to be free of any risk of contracting a communicable disease, we’d need to lock ourselves in our houses, isolate, and spend our time sanitizing and overcooking everything in sight. “This sounds like a sad and hollow existence to me,” she observes—and never mind that several survivors of the 1918 influenza pandemic whom she quotes counsel modern-day plague navigators to do just that. Apart from a few witty notes on our history of “surviving plague after plague,” Nixon’s points have been addressed by many other writers in the current flood of pandemic-related literature, and her suggestion at the end that we all make nice with vaccine deniers and other enemies of common sense is cloying: “I’m convinced that the differences I see on the surface are red herrings meant to divide us, to distract us from the ways we could be banding together.” Peace and love are all well and good, but even better is a shot in the arm.

A nonessential entry in a crowded field.

Kirkus Reviews