The American Studies program’s Manon Parry is also Professor of Medical History at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Starting in February 2020, she has taught the Introduction to Medical and Health Humanities. It was clear then that coronavirus would became “a topic we could not ignore in our class,” she noted. Her course materials and her writings about the pandemic are available on the website of the PULSE Network, for medical and health humanities.
Course materials of interest to Americanists include the historian Nancy Tomes’s account of the influenza pandemic, and her history of US health care debates:
- Nancy Tomes, “’Destroyer and Teacher’: Managing the Masses During the 1918-1919 Influenza Pandemic.” Public Health Reports (Washington, D.C. : 1974) vol. 125 Suppl 3,Suppl 3 (2010): 48-62. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2862334/
- Nancy Tomes: “Medicare for All in the Age of Coronavirus: A History of US Health Care Debates,” Perspectives on History (April 24, 2020). https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/may-2020/medicare-for-all-in-the-age-of-coronavirus-a-history-of-us-health-care-debates