Tuesday, 7 April 2020

Thanks To The Invention Of The Electron Microscope,

we can now see the microscopic organisms that plague us,


today it is coronavirus (COVID-19), but what was it like before we could see these viruses? How did we portray them? back then, what we only knew was diseases were “invisible, supernatural, and terrifying.” And so we used representations that fit on these said qualities, like the Grim Reaper and demons, "Little figures of demons that were physically attacking the body," offers Jared Gardner. He's a professor of popular culture at the Ohio State University with an interest in medical humanities and cartoons. He curated a recent exhibition on the topic called Drawing Blood. "A lot of the early anthropomorphizations are less about disease and more about pain," he explains. "Like little dogs biting our feet for gout, for example." for more details about this story have a look at NPR image credit: UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library, showing The Wasp cover from 1882 that depicts disease as three skeletons hovering over San Francisco. The skeletons represent malarium, small pox and leprosy.


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