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

Nixon (Kept From All Contagion), a medical humanities professor and self-described “disease-lover,” explores past pandemics in this creative if cursory survey. Nixon believes “studying the past will show us how we can craft not only our biological survival... but also how to think ahead,” and assembles 30 thought-provoking lessons from historical texts related to pandemics. A look at Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and Due Preparations for the Plague, for example, yields the idea that “like it or not, we need economies,” and thus economic shutdowns should be avoided. Nixon is transparent that Defoe himself was a merchant and likely to have a bias, but never deeply engages with countervailing opinions that might complicate the lesson. Elsewhere, she studies interviews with survivors of the 1918 influenza pandemic and pieces together recreations of their experiences. This leads to the lesson that “the kids are not all right” and an exploration of the impact of school closures on child development. Puzzlingly, though, her recreations don’t cover school closures and her supporting research is largely anecdotal. While Nixon believes medical humanities can provide a perspective that allows for discerning when a claim is “actually scientific fact rather than simply a reflection of our own cultural biases,” her readings often fall into that very trap. For a history of quarantine, readers can look elsewhere. (June)