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Life continues to come at me before I can catch everything (work is getting better! but I am a fool who forgot the golden rule not to get involved with straight guys, so lmao @me), but oh man am I enjoying my course on AIDS as the modern epidemic. I know, that sounds strange to say; infectious diseases really aren't a done interest. Much less STIs, and much less gay-related STIs, with the compounding stigmas. But I do enjoy medical history on my own, and I had the background in biology for a while, and now it's coming together with the social history and seeing how all the factors fit together to make AIDS what it was and is, is so fascinating and exciting to understand better and better.

And like, today I stayed back to ask the professor a thing about HIV and the Spanish Flu and cytokines, and we ended up walk/talking about gram-negative bacteria and toxin production, and I have so missed that. I just have been building this information pool on my own, informally, for so long, and now to get to actually apply it all and rather stretch the bio-related mental muscles is such a good time. I've been meaning to take this class for a while, and it really throws sharp light on how burying myself in the philosophy department with course overload for so long was burning me out. Like, yes, it's been for a good cause because I'm dual-tracking and accelerating my MA and I love philosophy too and I'm glad to have that opportunity, but still. I really was drowning in humanities, and despite it all, I am still the son of a laboratory technician. And I've been neglecting that interest for too long.

The thing about taking it this season, though, is that we’re in an infectious and stigmatized disease course while the coronavirus is happening. And it’s racialized, this time, instead of homophobic, but the patterns are still very present. Cal pulled a class act earlier this month, by posting a ‘common reactions to illness’ flyer including xenophobia, and couldn’t that have been said better. (they did take it down.) And now there’s hysterics because an american soldier got it in south korea, and listen, I am sorry that he’s sick, I am! But there is nothing on the face of this planet that makes americans (american military members) so special that it should make a difference if it were GI Joe or anyone else at all. Ugh. There’s just so much wrapped up in that I don’t know where to start.

Actually, as it so happens, at the beginning of the 1900s there was also a disease outbreak blamed on chinese people - the first cases of plague on the continental united states. Because when you’ve got a population confined to slums and denied appropriate care, why not go ahead and blame them for illnesses that hit them correspondingly harder?? But actually, one of my favorite comments about the entire discipline of biology comes from a book about that epidemic: science without compassion is a dry and punitive discipline [^1]. And isn’t that just everything.

Man. What with it all, I can only shrug at SF declaring a state of emergency. Like, tbh I think it’s a good idea, because that opens the door to better inter-agency cooperation, but I got back from work and walked in to people with so much panic about it all, and I have not got the bandwidth to effectively calm everyone down. Frankly, what with starting with the Iran snafu, this whole year to date I’ve been walking around wrapped in Kaminsky’s poem - we lived quietly during the war, I hear it whispering at me. I’m too tired to be concerned, just in general. Maybe Lenten mindfulness’ll help.

[^1] the full context of the quote is also timely again:
Joseph Kinyoun, the bacteriologist and quarantine officer who diagnosed San Francisco’s plague, was chased out of town as an archenemy of the people. As a scientist, he was undone by mercenary politicians, who bartered the city’s health for trade. He was a victim of official denial and protectionism. But his character, in turn, fed the city’s animus. He was proud, isolated, dismissive of the very plague patients who most needed his help. Clashing with the Chinese and pouring fuel on the city’s anger, he was, in his own view, at war with everyone. Kinyoun’s quarantine and travel restrictions against Asians, while supported by his superiors, were crude and discriminatory tools. Moreover, we now know that, even if the courts had not overturned them, such measures would not have stopped bubonic plague. Wounded and uncomprehending, Kinyoun quit San Francisco, and shortly afterward, the public health service. His career on the national stage was over, and its premature end was a reminder that science without compassion is a dry and punitive discipline.

P. 207. Chase, Marilyn. The Barbary Plague. New York, Random House. 2003. Sometimes I think Chase could have used different jargon, but overall the book is a strongly humanely oriented chapter of history.