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Longwood Author Series: Caste, Race, and the Social Order
October 23rd, 2023 @ 4:30 pm - 6:00 pm
Caste, Race, and the Social Order:
Shaping Who Gets – and Who Cares for Those With – Tuberculosis
Join Vidya Krishnan, author of Phantom Plague: How Tuberculosis Shaped History, and Maria Smilios, author of The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis, in conversation with Carole D. Mitnick, ScD, Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, and Scott Podolsky, MD, Director of the Center for the History of Medicine.
About the Authors
Vidya Krishnan is an investigative journalist who has been reporting on India’s HIV and TB epidemics for the past two decades, and on COVID19 more recently. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Atlantic, and The Caravan magazine, among others. Her awards include a global health journalism fellowship from Oxford University, a global health media scholarship from McGill, and a Neiman Fellowship at Harvard. Her non-fiction debut, Phantom Plague: How Tuberculosis Shaped History, is an autopsy of the global TB policy, centering the perspective of developing nations like India and South Africa. She lives in Goa, India.
Maria Smilios, a New York City native, holds a Master of Arts in religion and literature from Boston University, where she was a Luce Scholar and a Presidential Scholar. While working as a development editor in the Biomedical Sciences, she discovered the story of the Black Angels. Her debut non-fiction book, The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis, celebrates the tenacious Black nurses who were called to work at Sea View TB sanatorium when white nurses quit and who ultimately prevailed under impossible circumstances, showing us how the human spirit and the will to survive can ultimately change the course of history. She has written for The Guardian, American Nurse, The Forward, Narratively, The Rumpus, and DAME Magazine.
This event is co-sponsored by the Countway Library Center for the History of Medicine, the HMS Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, the HMS History of Medicine Interest Group, and the HMS Arts and Humanities Initiative.
