Webinar: Epidemiological Forerunners and Afterlives Tue, November 15

Sly Saint · Nov 11, 2022

Emma Broder, from the History of Science department at Harvard University, will talk to us about outbreak investigations & contested illness

By Hidden Epidemics, University of Cambridge

About this event

2 hours

Mobile eTicket

This talk considers epidemic neuromyasthenia as a historical disease by examining three outbreaks from 1934-1956 in the United States and Iceland. It also asks how historians and other social scientists might think about EN in relation to similar diseases like myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), which it is often linked or compared to.

Occurring during a time where plausibly viral illnesses of unknown cause were common in medicine, outbreaks of neuromyasthenia were managed clinically and epidemiologically as if they were a more straightforward entity, granting the disease a greater legitimacy than ME/CFS has held. The ways in which the disease was not straightforward, and eluded (bio)medicine’s understanding, gave it a popular reputation as a possibly hysterical entity, an impression that still haunts illnesses like ME/CFS and long covid.

I argue that changing clinical and epidemiological technologies altered the way the complex, nonspecific condition was described and understood, at the expense of patient experiences which present a more unified picture of these conditions across time. The technical versus experiential lenses capture different afterlives of the epidemics, on the one hand a forgotten entity whose objective signs disappeared from it’s diagnostic criteria, on the other, as a debilitating chronic illness with the ability to shape lives.
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Tue, November 15, 2022, 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM UTC
Location

Online

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/epidemiological-forerunners-and-afterlives-tickets-453861771777

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Webinar: Epidemiological Forerunners and Afterlives Tue, November 15

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