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I love your insight on Tweedy’s piece as it is quite interesting to put into perspective. I once did research under a Internal Medicine doctor and a host of Nurse Practitioners and the racial disparity in the workplace is quote disparaging. There was a large tendency to ask minority patients what prescriptions they were taking, if they were abusing any medication or taking any other drugs as well as where their daily activities. I cannot recall one event of asking any other patients these questions. One part of the forum post that really stuck with me is how you found a lack of facilities and work in North Carolina in relation to healthcare services. I have lived in NC my whole life and anytime my mother has had an appointment for thyroid cancer treatment and/or Leukemia testing she has had to either travel to UNC or Duke or travel out of state (with a three day trip to the Mayo Clinic costing $494,000). The medical fields main focus should be demarcated to bettering the lives of patients but with problems like cultural competency as we previously discussed too much time is being allocated to studying diversity, but in all actuality teaching stigma and not enough time is being spent on learning empathy.
I loved reading this post as it really hits hard in relation to the emotional dexterity of AIDS patients. My mother’s best friend in high school was diagnosed with AIDS (while in the 12th grade) and my grandparents refused to let my mother visit him as it was against their religious preference. The part of the movie that discussed a patient whose family would not visit him (if I am not mistaken his name was Steve) reminds us that fear as well as stigma keep us from holding on to the relationships we hold most dearly. In addressing homosexual and heterosexual accounts of nurses who combated the disease, it seems almost reasonable to say that these nurses are the side of the disease that we turn a blind-eye to out of hopelessness.
Hello, Julia.
I never paid much thought to the Prince’s being named Prospero. Now that you mention it the lavishness of his party does prove that he has little concern about the people outside of his residence. This oddly reminds me of how celebrities are currently talking about cures and test kits for coronavirus and how they can afford testing when it is something the average person cannot afford. As far as the Journal of a Plague Year goes, I think the numbers show that catastrophe was more prominent in specific areas, which led to the masses fearing that if it can happen to one person it can happen to anyone. I do find the idea of using the supernatural to explain such phenomena quite interesting as mimicking the plague does not change its severity.
The pandemic has definitely slowed down the pace of things around me. I live approximately 6 minutes from Fort Bragg, more specifically near the PX and when it was revealed that 2 cases where found on the base, everything was shut down. The only people allowed on base are essential personnel of a certain rank. Also, any location that is not a gas station, laundromat, post office, pharmacy, or grocery store has had to close as of 5 p.m. yesterday with time restrictions starting on last week, so Fayetteville, especially my side of town, looks deserted. As far as my household goes, my mother is being hit the hardest as she has tried to minimize how much she leaves our home due to her weak immune system but from this recommendation, she has had to rely on my brother and I to go out to pick up prescriptions and she even has an appointment set up for chemoradiation which will be more than likely cancelled. So hopefully, this will settle down and this period of quarantine will be over soon. I hope everyone else is doing okay and please stay safe.
Priscilla Wald’s “Introduction“, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative and Edgar Allen Poe’s ““The Masque of the Red Death” relay the concept of contagious disease in similar yet diverging ways. Priscilla Wald uses superspreaders as a role given to people who are deemed accountable for the spreading of infectious disease. An example that fit into the realm of so-called “Yellow Peril” was a flight attendant who was determined to have infected the masses through her contact with others. This lead to what Wald says is “a convention of the outbreak narrative, in which human carriers rhetorically (or, in some of the fiction, literally) bring the virus itself to life.”. This same metamorphosing is what gives the Red Death such infamy in Poe’s piece. Prior descriptions of a tall figure adorned in a corpse-like mask and wielding a weapon would lead one to believe that Poe’s antagonist would be similar to the count in Phantom of the Opera. However, a mere glancing at this assailant leaves the partygoers dead in which he vanquishes to wreak more havoc.
I have read Masque of the Red Death on numerous occasions but it was until I read the Introduction piece that it had more power. One quote that really stuck out was ” into a holocaust was not just a new infectious agent but a proliferation of roads, cities and airports, a breakdown of social traditions, and the advent of blood banking and needle sharing” (Wald 6). In comparing a disease to Holocaust-like activity emphasizes the horrors of infectious disease. However, it also antagonizes areas that are hubs of such illness. Ironically contagion means to touch but in a broader sense became the results of harmful interactions with causal agents. These “causal agents, change the scope of what humans carry in a rhetorical sense (mindsets and rumors leading to hysteria) as well as the physical.
Sources:
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Masque of the Red Death.” Poe’s Works: Edgar Allan Poe Museum, PoeMuseum, 1842, http://www.poemuseum.org/the-masque-of-the-red-death.Wald, Priscilla. 2008. “Introduction“, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative.
The piece “A Journal of the Plague Year” is quite interesting as it is somewhat colloquial with current world crises. We are introduced to what is essentially a blame game whether “it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant, among some goods which were brought home by their Turkey fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus” (Defoe, 1). Despite information on the billing for the death toll which is given for multiple provinces, the plague is prominent and at that point in time death was inevitable. However, further rapport was made hyperbolic through lack of knowledge and resources. Vignettes used such as the unpalatable living conditions of a man that was alive one day and gone the next as well as people seeking talismans show how public hysteria expanded. However, what is most interesting to me about this passage are the religious overtones used in Defoe’s passage. The plague is posited as a moral conflict. It is quite damning to insist that spreading of the plague was a warning from God. To say that would be to imply that God targeted the impoverished as a means of showing the well off members of society to change how they view and handle the plague. In the end, most people return to day to day life as if the plague did not change the speed of things.
The story is also interesting for the fact that Daniel Defoe was merely 4-5 years old at the height of the plague. The point-of-view of the story seems to be a first-person account of the plague and thus somewhat biographical, but this work would probably best fit under the category of historical fiction. In relation to current world crises as previously mentioned, it seems as if blame is being assigned to one group. Stratification among people makes times like these unbearable and much similar to the case of Defoe poignant. It seems as if the plague would have been contained through better resources, aid in susceptible communities, and social distancing as it is currently being observed. In closing, “A Journal of the Plague Year” places disease into a historical context and while the passage is not medical, it digs through social receptivity.
