Typhoid, Montclair and service learning

As a side project, C and I are trying to put together a curated New York City walk.  We're starting with a public health theme, centered on the story of "typhoid" Mary Mallon, perhaps the most famous silent carrier in American history.  It's easy to see epidemics like typhoid as urban problems, and many health experts throughout history have prescribed a clean air rest cure exactly because the close, airless conditions that are common in cities were thought to be insalubrious.  (An aside, at a recent talk at NYU David Oshinsky argued that Roosevelt's polio might be traced to just such a proscription for clean air.  Oshinsky thinks that stress from Congressional hearings about gays in the Navy combined with a vacation that featured vigorous outdoor activity and swimming in the Bay of Fundy made Roosevelt particularly susceptible to the polio virus, which he might have picked up while visiting a boyscout jamboree in 1921.)  I came across another counterexample while looking for an organic dairy that would deliver near where I live.  In 1894, the New York Times reported a "local epidemic of typhoid fever in Montclair, NJ" that was traced to a Verona milkman named G.W. Gould.  There's no particular revelation here - typhoid can be spread through a number of media and food was historically one of the most common.
Having recently re-worked my statement of teaching philosophy - in which I lay a great deal of emphasis on encouraging students to think of history in terms of human consequences rather than a litany of facts, this article on the Montclair typhoid epidemic served as a nice reminder of the ways in which academic history can intersect in unexpected ways with "real" life - and reminds me how much I want to destabilize the model that deliniates between life in the ivory tower and everything outside of it.  The "service learning" concept, which is used by some colleges to encourage their students to "not only learn the practical applications of their studies, [but also to] become actively contributing citizens and community members through the service they perform," satisfies this need admirably.

Gem from the archives

From the Dublin Nation of October 17th, 1846:

"On the whole, we advise the Irish people by no means to rely on government officials, or government relief, and especially to fear and distrust mere Political Economists."

Scaling tragedy.

Two things.  Yesterday I went to Skibbereen.  Today I watched an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? featuring Lisa Kudrow.

(I think that Who Do You Think You Are? is really fascinating T.V.  The people they profile always seem to be transformed by what they find out - from Sarah Jessica Parker saying that knowing one of her ancestors went west for the gold rush changed everything she knew about herself to Spike Lee saying that he always knew who he was, now he just knew more.  I've been interested in my family's history for, if not as long as I can remember, at least some time - so the idea of never asking questions about where parents and grandparents and great-grandparents are from feels unnatural to me.)

For people who study Irish history, Skibbereen (a village in west Cork, about 50 miles from Cork city) has become a stand-in for all of the worst parts of Ireland during the 1845-52 famine.  In part, its development as an archetype for famine Ireland comes from the fact that during the famine, residents of Skibbereen - particularly Dr. O'Donovan and Rev. Traill - worked hard to let local elites and government representatives in Dublin know about the extent of destitution in their district.  Their many letters made Skibbereen famous as a place where scenes of horror were plentiful, and diarists and artists on tours of Ireland in the 1840s and 1850s would often stop at Skibbereen to see "real" Irish destitution.  In addition, the most iconic images of the famine today - like the "Boy and Girl at Cahera"produced for the Illustrated London News in February of 1847 - were drawn in Skibbereen and its environs. 

Given the iconic place that Skibbereen holds in the imaginations of historians of the famine, and the central role it played in nineteenth-century accounts of suffering in Ireland, it was hard for me to imagine the town at all.  I think I was expecting something greyer, and more sinister than the cheerful and very typical Irish streetscape that I found.  There is a museum devoted to the famine, as well as a walking tour that takes you to the town's soup kitchen, the site of the old poor house, and the dispensary - but today these are just eighteenth and nineteenth-century buildings, like any other less meaningful edifice on any street in any small Irish town.  I think that I had been expecting to feel the scale of the tragedy in some way.  I knew, I had read about, people dying in the streets of Skibbereen - in some of the very spots that I stopped.  I knew that the poor house turned people away, and that those lucky enough to get in were packed in so close that there was no room to move - but I simply didn't feel the chill of that knowledge as much as I'd expected to.  I looked for it too at the Abbeystrewery Graveyard, site of a burial pit into which it is estimated that 9,000 people were buried, coffinless and nameless, during the famine.  One boy was so ill that his mother thought he had died, and buried him alive in the pit.  He was able to dig his way out through the corpses, but remained marked for life both mentally and physically.  The physical injury has been attributed to the fact that his mother broke his legs in order to get him into the only coffin available.

The famine plot is the lighter green patch at the bottom of the hill.

The graveyard in Skibbereen is an eloquent, and muted testimony to suffering.  The graveyard is built on a hill, with most grave markers precariously perched on whatever ground is available in the midst of rocky outcroppings.  The only truly flat area, which would be the easiest and most likely place to put new graves under other circumstances, has no graves, and marks the plot where the famine pit was.  It's not a shocking memorial.  There are no accounts of abject suffering, or of people dying of starvation - I think that the people who designed this memorial assumed that no one would visit the graveyard without some prior knowledge of the famine and its impact.  But I also have to imagine what it must be like to live today with the responsibility of tending to the historical legacy of Skibbereen.  The town as a whole seems relatively ambivalent towards the famine - which is totally understandable.  Who would want to actively remember that the place you live is famous for suffering?  I don't think that I had anticipated the fact that Skibbereen was a real place.  I had fetishized the suffering so much in my head that it had almost become divorced from reality.  There's an old chestnut of a Stalin quote (supposedly) that's something like 'one death is a tragedy, one thousand deaths are statistics' [See note] that I think rings true for historians of disaster.  It was almost impossible, for me at least, to get my head around the scale of the suffering as a consequence of the famine - so much so that when confronted with an actual place and actual graves, all I felt was disconnect.

By way of contrast, on the episode of WDYTYA? that I watched today, Lisa Kudrow learned that her great-grandmother had been forced by SS officers to stand at the edge of a pit with two other members of her family, and had been shot and then set on fire.  That was evocative, and tear-jerking - everything I thought I'd feel in SkibbereenSkibbereen does an excellent job of honoring its past while not becoming mired in re-enacting tragedy - and I am working, as someone who studies crises to keep the epic scale of disasters and the poignant narratives of individual sufferers in my head - and do justice to both in my work - at the same time.


NOTE: On this topic, Eddie Izzard says:

"Pol Pot killed 1.7 million people and we can't even deal with that.  I think, you know, we think somebody kills someone that's murder, you go to prison.  You kill ten people, you go to Texas they hit you with a brick, that's what they do.  Twenty people, you go to a hospital, they look through a small window at you forever.  And over that ... we can't deal with it, you know?  Somebody's killed 100,000 people we're almost going 'well done! well done!  You killed 100,000 people?  Well, you must get up very early in the morning.  I can't even get down the gym!  Your diary must look odd: get up in the morning death, death, death, death, death, death, death.  Lunch.  Death, death, death.  Afternoon tea.  Death, death, death ... "

A quick note on death and the Celtic fringe

Most crime dramas feature scenes in the morgue, when quirky doctors pore over, and sometimes talk to the dead.  We expect these coroners to be weird.  After all, who in their right mind - mainstream culture asks - would choose to spend their time with corpses?  This weirdness tends to be coded into the character themself.  It is not enough for audiences to assume difference because someone works in a morgue instead of a doctor's office - most portrayals of coroners in popular culture, and particularly television and film, assign them other "othering" characteristics.  In U.S. television, sassy women of color or creepy cadaverous men dominate, but in British crime dramas, coroners are almost always a denizen of the Celtic fringe.  A few examples: in the Inspector Lynley Mysteries the coroner, Stuart Lafferty is a punk-rock-listening Irishman.  In Being Human, the coroner Quinn is Scottish, and also helping the vampires of Bristol cover their tracks.  Even in NCIS, an American drama, the coroner is a Scot by the name of Dr. "Ducky" Mallard.

As someone who spends a fair amount of time engaging with differences - real, imagined or constructed - between "The Celts" and "the rest," the persistent use of Scottish or Irish actors to play those who work was perhaps more noticeable to me than it is to either the people who watch these shows or the people who write them.  I'm not sure whether this casting is due to a lingering association between the Scottish anatomists of the nineteenth century and the the modern coroner, or between the morbid and decidedly weird Burke and Hare; or is just another way of signaling that those who work with death are not part of the mainstream.  Either way, now that I've started to look for "Celticness" in popular culture as a marker of difference, I'm starting to think that it's a ubiquitous trope in English programs especially.  Want to subtly (or not so subtly) signal that someone is a little odd, or wild, or unknowable?  Find an actor with a Scottish, Welsh or Irish accent.

Oversharing

There have been several notable instances of oversharing on the internet of late, the most recent being the UCLA student who posted a rant on YouTube about Asian students in the library.  I think we think of oversharing of this type as a problem of the moment - exacerbated by internet technology and a generation of facebook, twitter and blogger users.  But, as it happens, I've come across a few wonderful moments of - if not oversharing per se - then at least someone saying something in what they believed to be a private forum, or a relatively un-public forum, only to have it widely, and regrettably circulated.
My most recent example is from accounts of the minutes of the Cork Poor Relief Society:  The Secretary read a form of application for pecuniary assistance, which was to be forwarded to affluent members of society, requesting subscriptions for the poor.  It was approved and the secretary was requested to note down the names of all parties to whom he had written.

The Secretary said that he had written to the members of the medical profession already
Mr. Burke said that he had applied to Dr. William Lloyd for a subscription, and the doctor stated that he would give no money, but would attend the poor professionally two hours each day, gratuitously, give advice and any medicine he ordered them, he would pay out of his own pocket. - (loud laughter)

 One can imagine, reading the transcript of this meeting the next day, that the members wished they either had not laughed so loudly at the prospect of Dr. Lloyd being generous, or that the correspondent from the Cork Constitution (which paper campaigned against the kind of relief the committee was distributing) might have been more delicate in his note-taking.

On disasters

Ruth Reichl, one of my favorite writers, both on food and otherwise, apparently got into a bit of an internet kerfuffle over a tweet.  Before reading the news out of Japan, Reichl tweeted "Basking in sunshine. Gently fried eggs, soft golden yolks. Bright salsa: chiles, onions, tomatoes. Black beans. Warm tortillas. So fine."  The internet, predictably, responded with a measure of vitriol over how a public personality could bask in sunshine and eggs when tens of thousands of people are dying.  Reichl responded with a measured and thoughtful blog post on what she called "horror and gratitude."


While this is notable as a primer for the best results of internet scuffles, I was particularly struck by this passage (emphasis mine):

"There is no time, ever, in which a terrible disaster is not taking place somewhere on the planet.  And thanks to modern technology, we know all about it almost immediately. As I see it, we have a moral responsibility to respond to those disasters in the best ways that we can. Write letters, send money, do whatever possible to alleviate pain, end suffering and make the world a more just place."

I think a lot about the intersection between technology and responses to news.  I think that one of the reasons that the Irish famine became such a lightning rod for international interest was that the news technology (ease of printing, speed over land by rail, quick ocean crossings by steam, even faster movement of information by telegraph) made it possible for people as far away from the epicenter of disaster as the Cherokee nation and the Ottoman empire to experience news of suffering in time to do something about it.  I think that Reichl is right - that the rapidity with which we know about something means that we are forced to make quicker and quicker decisions about what we can do.

But I wonder too how that quickness-of-knowing affects the aid environment.  I am absolutely no expert in contemporary humanitarianism, in the running and mechanisms of aid groups or not-for-profits, or on the mechanics of getting aid to the people who need it most.  But it seems to me that since we now have the technology to make everyone a commentator on every crisis (that receives a certain degree of media attention - and that certainly means that many, many are ignored) information might get muddled.  The many stories about the state of Japan's nuclear reactors circulating on twitter in the wake of the earthquake alone seem to point to an information environment in which rumors and facts become intertwined and confused as quickly as it takes someone to write them.  I am again (as I so often am) reminded of my own research, about the many and conflicting ideas about how to save the potato crop, from soaking the plants in lye to coating them in guano, that we know in retrospect were terribly wrong, and likely detrimental, but which were presented with authority in major newspapers because someone of note had speculated at some point that they might work.

So I guess my question is: is there a way to balance widely available and accessible sources of information (and abilities to share information) with some kind of factual "truth?"  Put another way (since that last sentence wasn't entirely clear) what do we gain and loose, in a crisis, from hundreds, thousands, millions of competing stories, some of which will necessarily be right and some wrong?  What do we gain and loose by limiting narratives to those that are "correct"?  I am inclined to err on the side of greater freedoms - both to produce and to consume information - but I do wonder how those freedoms play out in crises and disasters.

Childhood favourites and disappointment

Last night was one for retro-relaxation.  After spending the day tying up loose ends on various projects - and getting excited about the issue of Early American Studies that I'm a co-guest editor for - I went home to my Corkonian flat, caught the tail end of The Spy Who Loved Me and put on Back to the Future while making dinner.  Now, I love James Bond, but in order to watch any of the older stuff, and a good portion of the newer movies, I have to suppress the desire to yell at the t.v. about sexism.  Part of watching Bond movies is knowing, and to some degree accepting, that the women will be at best one-dimensional, that there will be at least one point when Bond demands, and promptly receives romantic attention from some woman just 'cause he's Bond, and that I will probably come to the conclusion, at the end of the movie, that the writers/directors/other people associated with making it did not have much regard for women.

This is the Bond contract.  I do not have a similar mental arrangement with the Back to the Future trilogy, because most of what have retained from watching the movies as a kid is something like: time travel is cool!  Christopher Lloyd is cooky!  Hoverboards!  But watching last night I was kind of shocked by the degree to which the first movie, at least, turns on a unilateral idea of what gendered relationships ought look like.  In the first, less desirable reality the McFly family is lower-middle class, the mother drinks and is (horrors!) not thin, the sister can't get a boyfriend, and the father is a doormat for The Bully.  We learn that the backstory behind this scenario is that the dad (George) fell out of a tree while spying on naked girls, and that the mom (Loraine) rescues him, decides she loves him, and marries him.  After Marty goes back in time and convinces his dad to be more assertive, which includes rescuing Loraine from attempted rape at the hands of Biff (The Bully), and forcibly removing Loraine from the arms of another man at the dance, the future is better, shinier, richer, and for Loraine, thinner.  So, a message to take home from Back to the Future: passive man+assertive woman=world in which men are crippled by insecurity and walked all over by everyone, including the women in the family.  Assertive man+passive woman=world where the family is rich, the kids are successful, the mom is thin and the sister has lots of dates.

These aren't surprising gender roles, but a bit dissapointing given my memory of the movie as one of almost universal coolness.  Perhaps the time machine and time traveling dog clouded my recollections.