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ABSTRACT
This essay offers a review of the ways that North American historians have approached the history of epidemics in education to date and it identifies a few key historiographical trends and research questions raised by American and Canadian work. The history of epidemics in education is located at the intersection of three vibrant fields of study: the history of science and medicine, the history of education, and the history of disability. The essay explores how, in the context of North American scholarship, the history of education and epidemics emerges out of broader discussions from those fields. Recent historical studies of pandemics, raised after the outbreak of COVID-19, are also used to introduce the topic.
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper was presented (virtually) at Humboldt University, Berlin Colloquium on Educational History and Cultural Studies of the Present, 3 June 2021. The author would like to thank Kim Tolley, the History of Education Quarterly, Jim Tobin, Miami University, and Rick Mikulski, Government Documents & Social Sciences Librarian and Portland State University Library for their help in this research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 Howard Phillips, “The Recent Wave of ‘Spanish’ Flu Historiography,” Social History of Medicine 27, no. 4 (2014): 789–808.
2 Pier Paolo Bassareo and others, “Learning from the Past in the COVID-19 Era: Rediscovery of Quarantine, Previous Pandemics, Origin of Hospitals and National Healthcare Systems, and Ethics in Medicine.” Postgraduate Medical Journal 96 (2020): 633–8; Seble Tadesse and Muluye Worku, “The Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Education System in Developing Countries: A Review,” Open Journal of Social Sciences 8 (2020): 159–70; Lakshmi Krishnan, S. Michelle Ogunwole, and Lisa A. Cooper, “Historical Insights on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, and Racial Disparities: Illuminating a Path Forward,” Annals of Internal Medicine 173 (2020): 474–81; Henry Louis Taylor Jr, “The Pre-Covid-19 World: Race and Inequity in Higher Education,” Higher Education’s Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic: Building A More Sustainable and Democratic Future (Council of Europe Higher Education Series No. 25, 2021): 41.
3 Koen Vermeir, “Doing History in the Time of COVID‐19,” Cantaurus 62 (May 2020): 220.
4 Erica Charters, and Richard A. McKay, “The History of Science and Medicine in the Context of COVID‐19,” Centaurus 62 (May 2020): 223.
5 For a historiography of medical history and its emphasis on “disease history” see Beth Linker, “On the Borderland of Medical and Disability History: A Survey of the Fields,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 87, no. 4 (2013): esp. 506–13. Charles E. Rosenberg, “Disease in History: Frames and Framers,” The Milbank Quarterly (1989): 1–15; Dora Vargha, “Epidemic Years: A Third Look,” Isis 111, no. 4 (2020): 791–4; Naomi Rogers, “Explaining Everything? The Power and Perils of Reading Rosenberg,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 63, no. 4 (2008): 423–34.
6 Charles E. Rosenberg, “What is an Epidemic? AIDS in Historical Perspective,” Daedalus (1989): 1–17.
7 Heather F. Roller, “A Shared Toxic History,” The American Historical Review 125, no. 5 (2020): 1740–50. See also Peter Alagona and others, “Reflections: Environmental History in the Era of COVID-19,” Environmental History 25, no. 4 (2020): 595–686; special issue of COVID-19 and Environmental History, the Journal for the History of Environment and Society 5 (2020).
8 Mary Lindemann, “Slow History,” The American Historical Review 126, no. 1 (2021): 17.
9 Jonathan Malesic’s writing on work and spirituality, particularly under COVID is also helpful here: Jonathan Malesic, “The Future of Work Should Mean Working Less,” The New York Times, 23 September 2021.
10 “Pandemics: Past, Present, and Future: Coronavirus in Historical Perspective,” in Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, https://origins.osu.edu/coronavirus-covid-19-pandemic-1918-flu-hiv-vaccination. See also José Esparza, “Lessons From History: What Can We Learn From 300 Years of Pandemic Flu That Could Inform the Response to COVID-19?” American Journal of Public Health 110 no 8 (2020): 1160–1; Kathy Glatter and Paul Finkelman, “History of the Plague: An Ancient Pandemic for the Age of Covid-19,” The American Journal of Medicine (September 24, 2020).
11 Oxford University Press’s Oxford Academic Journal collection on the “History of Outbreaks”: https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/history_of_outbreaks. History Workshop special issue on “Apocalypse Then and Now”, 30 March 2020.
12 Giorgio Agamben, “Requiem for the Students” (trans. D. Alan Dean), Medium 23 (2020), https://d-dean.medium.com/requiem-for-the-students-giorgio-agamben-866670c11642. In a separate essay, Yong Zhao suggested optimistically that the traditionally persistent grammar of schooling might finally be disrupted by COVID, but only if we move away from the traditional grammar of schooling to a grammar of education. Zhao sees COVID as a “great opportunity” to DeSchool Society, as Ivan Illich argued 50 years ago: Yong Zhao, “Speak a Different Language: Reimagine the Grammar of Schooling,” International Studies in Educational Administration (Commonwealth Council for Educational Administration & Management) 48, no. 1 (2020).
13 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006). A number of scholars have explored the concept of precarity in labour in higher education in the COVID-19 context: Canan Neşe Kınıkoğlu and Aysegul Can, “Negotiating the Different Degrees of Precarity in the UK Academia during the Covid-19 Pandemic,” European Societies 23 (2021): 817–30; Wendy Green and others, “Precarity, Fear and Hope: Reflecting and Imagining in Higher Education during a Global Pandemic,” Higher Education Research and Development 39, no. 7 (2020): 1309–12.
14 Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education 1 (2021).
15 ISCHE Education and Pandemics Archives, www.ische.org/education-and-pandemics-archive/#/.
16 “Women Writing History: A Coronovirus Journaling Project” out of the National Women’s History Museum, www.womenshistory.org/journal-project; Kathleen Franz and Catherine Gudis, “Precedents to Documenting COVID-19,” The Journal of American History 107, no. 3 (2020): 692–5; Wideline Seraphin, “Resisting the ‘COVID-19 Scramble’ by Writing Towards Black Transnational Futures,” Community Literacy Journal 15, no. 1 (2021): 28–46; Jeffrey C. Alexander,“The Double Whammy Trauma: Narrative and Counter-narrative during Covid-Floyd,” Thesis Eleven (2020).
17 Andrew I. Spielman and Gulshan Sunavala‐Dossabhoy, “Pandemics and Education: A Historical Review,” Journal of Dental Education (2021); James W. Thomas and Holly Ann Foster, “Higher Education Institutions Respond to Epidemics,” History of Education Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2020): 185–201.
18 Keith Meyers and Melissa A. Thomasson, “Paralyzed by Panic: Measuring the Effect of School Closures During the 1916 Polio Pandemic on Educational Attainment,” National Bureau of Economic Research, no. w23890 (2017).
19 Vargha, “Epidemic Years,” 794.
20 Thomas and Foster, “Higher Education Institutions Respond.”
21 Catherine Gidney, “Institutional Responses to Communicable Diseases at Victoria College, University of Toronto, 1900–1940,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 24, no. 2 (2007): 266.
22 Some examples: Penney Clark and Amy von Heyking, “Back to School? Historians and the View from the Classroom,” Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire del’éducation (2018): 26–8; Kate Rousmaniere, “Teachers’ Work and the Social Relations of School Space in Early Twentieth-Century North American Urban Schools,” Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’Histoire de L’Education (Spring 1996): 42–64; Robert Douglas Gidney and Winnifred Phoebe Joyce Millar, How Schools Worked: Public Education in English Canada, 1900–1940 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2012), Ch. 4.
23 David H. DeJong, “‘Unless they are kept alive’: Federal Indian Schools and Student Health, 1878–1918,” American Indian Quarterly (2007): 256–82; Peter Grant, “A 1918 Influenza Outbreak at Haskell Institute: An Early Narrative of the Great Pandemic,” Kansas History 43 (2020): 56–82; Mikaëla M. Adams, “‘A Very Serious and Perplexing Epidemic of Grippe’ The Influenza of 1918 at the Haskell Institute,” American Indian Quarterly 44, no. 1 (2020): 1–35.
24 Capt. Richard H. Pratt’s famous dictum on the founding of the Indian Boarding School, Carlisle Indian School: http://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/teach/kill-indian-and-save-man-capt-richard-h-pratt-education-native-americans.
25 Megan Sproule-Jones, “Crusading for the Forgotten: Dr. Peter Bryce, Public Health, and Prairie Native Residential Schools,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 13 (1996): 199–224; John S. Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2017); Jean A. Keller, “‘In the Fall of the Year We Were Troubled with Some Sickness’: Typhoid Fever Deaths, Sherman Institute, 1904,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 23, no. 3 (1999): 97–117; Hiwi Te and Braden Paora, “‘Unlike their Playmates of Civilization, the Indian Children’s Recreation must be Cultivated and Developed’: The Administration of Physical Education at Pelican Lake Indian Residential School, 1926–1944,” Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation (2017): 99–118.
26 In a typhoid epidemic at Cornell University in 1903, where 29 students died as a result of the unregulated city water system, the crisis led to a community campaign to create a municipal water works and to expand university responsibility and outreach into student life: Heather Munro Prescott, “Sending their Sons into Danger: Cornell University and the Ithaca Typhoid Epidemic of 1903,” New York History 78, no. 3 (1997): 273–308. See also Heather Munro Prescott, “The White Plague Goes to College: Tuberculosis Prevention Programs in Colleges and Universities, 1920–1960,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74, no. 4 (2000): 735–72; Heather Munro Prescott, Student Bodies: The Influence of Student Health Services in American Society & Medicine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).
27 John Harley Warner, “Rereading The Gospel of Germs during a Pandemic,” Isis 111, no. 4 (2020): 824.
28 Kim Tolley, “School Vaccination Wars: The Rise of Anti-Science in the American Anti-Vaccination Societies, 1879–1929,” History of Education Quarterly 59, no. 2 (2019): 161–94; Katherine Arnup, “‘Victims of Vaccination?’ Opposition to Compulsory Immunization in Ontario, 1900–90,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 9, no. 2 (1992): 159–76; John Duffy, “School Vaccination: The Precursor to School Medical Inspection,” Journal of the History of Medicine & Allied Sciences 33, no. 3 (1978): 344–55; Richard J. Altenbaugh, Vaccination in America: Medical Science and Children’s Welfare (New York: Springer, 2018); Adam Laats, The Other School Reformers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
29 Mona Gleason, “Race, Class, and Health: School Medical Inspection and ‘Healthy’ Children in British Columbia, 1890 to 1930,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 19, no. 1 (2002): 97.
30 Michael J. Smith, “Dampness, Darkness, Dirt, Disease: Physicians and the Promotion of Sanitary Science in Public Schools,” in Profiles of Science and Society in the Maritimes Prior to 1914, ed. Paul A. Bogaard (Fredericton, NB: Acadiensis Press, 1990), 195–218; Catherine Carstairs, Bethany Philpott, and Sara Wilmshurst, Be Wise! Be Healthy! Morality and Citizenship in Canadian Public Health Campaigns (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018); Cynthia Comacchio, “‘The Rising Generation’: Laying Claim to the Health of Adolescents in English Canada, 1920–70,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 19, no. 1 (2002): 139–78.
31 Richard A. Meckel, Classrooms and Clinics: Urban Schools and the Protection and Promotion of Child Health, 1870–1930 (New Bruswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013).
32 Lisa M.F. Andersen, ‘Kids Know What They Are Doing’: Peer-Led Sex Education in New York City,” History of Education Quarterly 59, no. 4 (2019): 501–27; Douglas Bailey and others, “AIDS and American History: Four Perspectives on Experiential Learning,” Journal of American History 86, no. 4 (March 2000): 1721–33; Jill Blair, “Condoms and Kids: The Struggle for AIDS Education in New York City Public Schools,” Radical America 25, no. 1 (1991): 23–31; Judith A. Jennrich, “The Development of AIDS Education (K–12) in the United States through 1989” (PhD diss., Loyola University, Chicago 1992); Jonathan Zimmerman, Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
33 David L. Kirp, Learning by Heart: AIDS and Schoolchildren in America’s Communities (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Allan M. Brandt, “AIDS in Historical Perspective: Four Lessons from the History of Sexually Transmitted Diseases,” American Journal of Public Health 78, no. 4 (1988): 367–71; Jennifer Brier, “‘Save Our Kids, Keep AIDS Out’: Anti-AIDS Activism and the Legacy of Community Control in Queens, New York,” Journal of Social History 39, no. 4 (2006): 965–87.
34 T. Lynn Hogan and Audrey L. Rentz, “Fear of AIDS Among Faculty Members and Student Affairs Administrators,” Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice 35, no. 3 (1998): 237–44; Andrew S. Walters, “College Students’ Knowledge about AIDS and Reported Changes in Sexual Behavior,” NASPA Journal 29, no. 2 (1992): 91–100; Rosemary J. Moskal, “Effect of a Comprehensive AIDS Curriculum on a Knowledge and Attitudinal Changes in Northern Canadian College Students,” Canadian Journal of Counselling and Psychotherapy 25, no. 3 (1991): 338–48.
35 David L. Kirp and Steven Epstein, “AIDS in America’s Schoolhouses: Learning the Hard Lessons,” The Phi Delta Kappan 7, no. 8 (April 1989): 584–93; Sally Reed, “Kappan Special Report: Children with AIDS: How Schools Are Handling the Crisis,” The Phi Delta Kappan 69, no. 5 (1988): 1–12; Thomas J. Flygare, “Judge Orders Children with AIDS Virus Back into the Classroom,” The Phi Delta Kappan 69, no. 5 (1988): 381–2; Sally Reed, “AIDS in the Schools: A Special Report,” The Phi Delta Kappan 67, no. 7 (1986): 494–8; Katherine E. Keough and George Seaton, “Superintendents’ Views on AIDS: A National Survey,” The Phi Delta Kappan 69, no. 5 (1988): 358–36; Perry A. Zirkel, “AIDS: Students in Glass Houses?” The Phi Delta Kappan 70, no. 8 (1989): 646–8; Pauline B. Gough, “Uncovering AIDS,” The Phi Delta Kappan 70, no. 8 (1989): 578; David Walters, “AIDS the Teacher: What Have We Learned in Canada?” Canadian Journal of Public Health/Revue Canadienne de Santé Publique 80 (1989): 3–8; Dianne L. Kerr, “AIDS Update: The Canada Youth and AIDS Study,” Journal of School Health 59, no. 2 (1989): 86–7.
36 Charles Rosenberg, “The Tyranny of Diagnosis: Specific Entities and Individual Experience,” The Milbank Quarterly 80, no. 2 (2002): 237–60.
37 David Tyack and William Tobin, “The ‘Grammar’ of Schooling: Why Has It Been So Hard to Change?” American Educational Research Journal 31, no. 3 (1994): 454.
38 Rosenberg, “The Tyranny of Diagnosis,” 251.
39 Catherine J. Kudlick, “Disability History and History of Medicine: Rival Siblings or Conjoined Twins?” paper presented at the Society for the Social History of Medicine annual meeting, 3 September 2008, cited in Linker, “On the Borderland of Medical and Disability History,” 500.
40 Linker, “On the Borderlands of Medical and Disability History,” 502.
41 Ann Davis, “Invisible Disability,” Ethics 116, no. 1 (2005): 153–213.
42 Richard K Scotch, “Medical Model of Disability,” in Encyclopaedia of American Disability History, ed. Susan Burch (New York: Facts on File, 2009), 602.
43 Daniel J. Wilson, “Epidemics and Disability,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 94, no. 4 (2020): 700–09.
44 Coleen A. Boyle and others, “The Public Health Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic for People with Disabilities,” Disability and Health Journal 13, no. 3 (2020): 100943; Robin Wright, “Who is ‘Worthy’? Deaf-blind People Fear that Doctors Won’t Save Them from the Coronavirus,” The New Yorker (28 April 2020),www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/who-is-worthy-deaf-blind-people-fear-that-doctors-wont-save-them-from-the-coronavirus.
45 Wilson, “Epidemics and Disability,” 709.
46 Jason A. Ellis, A Class by Themselves? The Origins of Special Education in Toronto and Beyond (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019); Robert L. Osgood, “For Children who Vary from the Normal Type”: Special Education in Boston, 1838–1930 (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2000); Robert L. Osgood, The History of Special Education: A Struggle for Equality in American Public Schools (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2008); Robert L. Osgood, The History of Inclusion in the United States (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2005).
47 Douglas C Baynton and Maryann Ayim, “Forbidden Signs: American Culture & the Campaign Against Sign Language,” Canadian Journal of Education 22, no. 3 (1997); Susan Burch, “Reading Between the Signs: Defending Deaf Culture in Early Twentieth-Century America,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 214–35; Robert M. Buchanan and Robert Williams Buchanan, Illusions of Equality: Deaf Americans in School and Factory, 1850–1950 (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1999); John Vickrey Van Cleve, “The Academic Integration of Deaf Children: A Historical Perspective,” in The Deaf History Reader, ed. John Vickrey Van Cleve (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University, 2007).
48 Richard J. Altenbaugh, “Where are the Disabled in the History of Education? The Impact of Polio on Sites of Learning,” History of Education 35, no. 6 (2006): 705–30; Kate Rousmaniere, “Those Who Can’t, Teach: The Disabling History of American Educators,” History of Education Quarterly 53, no. 1 (2013): 90–103; Kristen Chmielewski, “‘Hopelessly Insane, Some Almost Maniacs’: New York City’s War on ‘Unfit’ Teachers,” Paedagogica Historica 54, no. 1–2 (2018): 169–83. See also the special issue on New Disability History in the History of Education, edited by Jason Ellis and Kate Rousmaniere, History of Education Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2020).
49 Richard J. Altenbaugh, “Polio, Disability, and American Public Schooling: A Historiographical Exploration,” Education Research and Perspectives 31, no. 2 (2004): 137–55; Karen K. Yoshida, Fady Shanouda, and Jason Ellis, “An Education and Negotiation of Differences: The ‘Schooling’ Experiences of English-Speaking Canadian Children Growing up with Polio During the 1940s and 1950s,” Disability & Society 29, no. 3 (2014): 345–58.
50 Rosenberg, “The Tyranny of Diagnosis,” 251.
51 Daniel J. Wilson, “And They Shall Walk: Ideal Versus Reality in Polio Rehabilitation in the United States,” Asclepio 61, no. 1 (2009): 175–92.
52 Linker, “On the Borderland of Medical and Disability History,” 500; Susan Wendell, “Unhealthy Disabled: Treating Chronic Illnesses as Disabilities,” Hypatia 16, no. 4 (2001): 17–33.
53 Linker, “On the Borderland of Medical and Disability History,” 528; Daniel J. Wilson, Living with Polio: The Epidemic and Its Survivors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Beth Linker, War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Cooter, “Disabled Body”, 378; Catherine J. Kudlick, “Disability History: Why We Need Another ‘Other,’” The American Historical Review 108, no. 3 (2003): 771–2.
54 Steven Phillips and Michelle A. Williams, “Confronting Our Next National Health Disaster – Long-haul Covid,” New England Journal of Medicine 385, no. 7 (2021): 577–9; Vellore Arthi and John Parman, “Disease, Downturns, and Wellbeing: Economic History and the Long-run Impacts of COVID-19,” Explorations in Economic History 79 (2021): 101381; Shanna K. Kattari, Miranda Olzman, and Michele D. Hanna. “‘You Look Fine!’ Ableist Experiences by People with Invisible Disabilities,” Affilia 33, no. 4 (2018): 477–92; Henry Harder, “Invisible Disabilities,” International Journal of Disability Management 4, no. 1 (2009): ii–ii.
55 Linker, “On the Borderland of Medical and Disability History,” 526.
57 Warner, “Rereading the Gospel of Germs,” 824; Linda Bryder, Below the Magic Mountain: A Social History of Tuberculosis in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
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Kate Rousmaniere
Kate Rousmaniere is a historian of education and Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Miami University, Oxford, Ohio and past president of ISCHE (2009–2012).