Pandemic course mixes past, present
When incoming freshmen at Slippery Rock University signed up for a new course called “Spotlight on the Past: Pandemic,” they had no idea the spring semester class would also shine light on the very real present, with the coronavirus outbreak resulting in a global pandemic.
“My students must think I'm psychic,” said Lia Paradis, associate professor of history, who teaches two sections of the 100-level liberal studies course. “It's just a bizarre coincidence that I am teaching this brand-new course right now.”
Students like Jenna Kriley, a freshman biology major, signed up for the class to fulfill part of her liberal studies requirement.
The Butler woman plans to attend medical school and become a surgeon after graduating from SRU and found herself drawn to the topic of pandemics as a way to help inform her medical career.
“It's ironic,” Kriley said. “(My classmates) talked about it before spring break, (saying,) 'What are the odds that we all signed up for a pandemics course and now we're in the middle of one?'”
Paradis came up with the idea for the class based on her expertise studying the events of World War I, which ended the same year as the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 began, and how the war contributed to the global spread of the disease. To prepare for the class, Paradis researched the bubonic plague, more commonly known as the Black Death, of the mid-1300s. She also figured stories of “ghost ships” arriving ashore with deceased crew members would capture students' attention.
“(For the Spotlight courses) we use different moments in history and look at them through the lenses of all the different humanities disciplines,” Paradis said. “It's a little bit of philosophy, literature, history, and the arts, to show students how people in the humanities ask and answer questions ... as well to see how understanding of disease has changed over time. Humans need to answer the same questions over and over again because these dilemmas come up over and over again. The coronavirus is proving that.”
The class focuses on three pandemics throughout history: the Black Death, which killed an estimated 75 million to 200 million people in Europe and Asia from 1347-51; the Spanish flu, which infected about a quarter of the world's population between 1918-20 and killed at least 50 million people; and HIV/AIDS, which, after an outbreak in the 1980s, has killed more than 35 million worldwide.
Coronavirus wasn't even mentioned in SRU's Pandemic class until a few weeks into the semester, but it soon became a daily discussion topic.
Parallels between the coronavirus and previous pandemics include racial prejudices, misrepresentation of disease name, socioeconomic privilege and irrational responses, like the hoarding of supplies. According to Paradis, examples include using the term Spanish flu, as geopolitical ploy, when there's evidence that the flu originated in the U.S. at a military camp in Kansas before soldiers were deployed for World War I. Because of countries' news censorships during World War I, reports of outbreaks became more widely attributed to Spain, which was neutral during the war.
“We compared the buying of all the toilet paper and hand sanitizer (today) and the similar types of panic in the 1300s with people hoarding supplies and overall mass hysteria,” Kriley said. “It's interesting to see parallels between the two given they are separated by more than 600 years.”
Kriley points out that while people's thinking about germ theories is more evolved than it was in the 1300s, it is still very similar when it comes to social behavior.
What's different now is how easily information, or rather misinformation, is spread.
“People get their information from so many different places now and there are a lot more rumors spread than in the past,” Paradis said. “Now, no one person can control all the information being released on the variety of outlets and that's extremely dangerous.”
