Both historical and contemporary records of mass contagion provide occasions for visibility to persons who otherwise remain little recognised and even less studied: those who bury the dead. While global reports attest to self-advocacy among cemetery workers in the current COVID-19 pandemic, the psychological complexities of their labour go virtually unseen. Findings on the experiences of those doing such work reveal a striking contrast. While societal disavowal often renders their task as abject and forgettable, those who inter the remains frequently report affective connections to the dead that powerfully, and poignantly, undermine this erasure. Acknowledging such empathic relationality allows us to look at this profession in areas where it has never been considered, such as psychoanalytic work on ‘mentalisation’ or in contemporary ethics. The article concludes with an example from the accounts of those who have buried the dead in the massed graves on New York’s Hart Island.
then bites a human ( World Health Organization, 2017 ). Once infection has taken place, the bacteria colonise the closest lymph gland, leading to the two key symptoms: painful round gland swellings known as buboes and dark-coloured bruises on the skin caused by internal haemorrhaging ( Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020b ). Bubonic plague is fatal when untreated in about 50–70 per cent of cases, but this rate drops to 10–15 per cent with treatment
(London: Routledge, 1997). 11 A. Takahashi, The Development of the Japanese Nursing Profession: Adopting and Adapting Western Influences (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004). 12 C. E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849 and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 4. 13 Literature on the spread and impact of the third plague pandemic is extensive and varied. Excellent summaries of the illness in a global or local context include 57 Angharad Fletcher C. Benedict, Bubonic Plague in Nineteenth-Century China (Stanford
2009). The Antonine plague, between ad 165 and 168, is likely to have accelerated the fall of the Western Roman Empire. This is believed to have been a smallpox epidemic and to have killed 3.5–5 million people (Wikipedia 2017a). Plague is due to a bacterium, Yersinia pestis commonly known as the plague bacillus, and typically gives rise to ‘bubonic plague’ which is spread by fleas from rats to humans. During pandemics it can also spread directly from human to human – giving rise to the even more deadly ‘pneumonic plague’. Plague has been one of the greatest scourges
, the syndromic surveillance system hopes ‘to detect an unexpected, improbable epidemic in its emergent stages’ (Fearnley, 2005: 29). To be sure, the PathoMap is meant to function in conjunction with a host of other, more traditional, forms of monitoring of disease. For instance, Afshinnekoo et al. (2015) are able to assure the public that the findings of large amounts of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, as well as some instances of anthrax and bubonic plague, are no real threats by putting these into a wider context. Yet what is important is that the PathoMap adds to
. J. Weindling (ed.), International Health Organisations and Movements 1918–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 14 M. Echenberg, Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894–1901 (New York: New York University Press, 2007
: Oswaldo Gonçalves Cruz. Aged just 27 and recently returned from the Pasteur Institute in Paris, he had been put in charge by the federal government of a new laboratory on the Manguinhos farm on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, with the goal of manufacturing a serum and vaccine for bubonic plague. Under the leadership of Gonçalves Cruz, a change in the approach to yellow fever was about to propel a new generation of bacteriologists to the front
year after the death of George’s grandmother, Victoria. The tour itself was a by-product of the South African War, designed by Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, to convey thanks for imperial service in the war and to bolster loyalty during troubled times for the empire. The future King’s visit to war-torn South Africa was nearly cancelled, because of an outbreak of bubonic plague. 127 The
patients’ experiences of the healing skills of the medical personnel, expressions of goodwill and the cost of treatment. Cooperation in epidemics: smallpox, sleeping sickness, bubonic plague Epidemic diseases required a coordinated response from missions and the administration. In the Shire Highlands, Blantyre Mission and the government were united in their goal of protecting the
bubonic plague in Cape Town. 158 In response, the editors of the Graham’s Town Journal asserted that ‘Capetown is not the Colony, and that a railway trip throughout the other ports and the chief inland towns would give their Royal Highnesses a better idea of the country, and bring them in touch with most of the loyal population’. 159 This public relations nightmare, as the Colonial Office understood