EP #148 - 10.14.2020 - Children, Aids, and COVID-19

Today we will discuss the history of pediatric AIDS, and talk about lessons from that history that help us see the COVID-19 pandemic more clearly.

Jason M Chernesky EARNED HIS PhD in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He studies the histories of health care, children's health, public health, and environmental history in the twentieth-century United States.  His dissertation, “The Littlest Victims”: Pediatric AIDS and the Urban Ecology of Health in the Late Twentieth-Century United States, explores what happens when a disease associated with the taboo behavior of adults begins affecting infants and children.  Pediatric AIDS was a disease of poverty, which became closely associated with the multiple problems of the inner city – an urban geography that, for many Americans, was situated "elsewhere." Jason’s other scholarly interests include urban history, public history, and cultural history.  

Dr. Stephen Pemberton is faculty in History at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and Rutgers University – Newark.  He is a historian of medicine, disease and health with expertise in United States history and the history and sociology of science. His research and teaching is also informed by his training in philosophy and his engagements with medical humanities scholarship and health policy debates over the past twenty-five years. His book: The Bleeding Disease: Hemophilia and the Unintended Consequences of Medical Progress (JHU 2011).

Janet golden, PhD is professor emeritus of history at Rutgers University. She specializes in the history of medicine, history, childhood, women's history, and American social history. She's the author, editor of numerous books and articles, including babies made us modern how infants brought Americans into the 20th century out with Cambridge press Message in a Bottle making a fetal alcohol syndrome with Harvard press. She co edits the critical issues in health and medicine series at Rutgers University Press and is the recipient of many grants and fellowships, including those awarded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Commonwealth Fund and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.