2014 Shaping the Future of New York Fridays: 11:00-1:45 Boylan Hall, 2231

How many times has the thoughts of the government and the fear ridden people lead to wrong decisions? How many times did the stigma of being poor carry over into a deserved death by plague? Apparently, a lot.
As I was reading the end chapters I was confused as to how many people assumed the poor were poor from choice, were living in filth by choice. Whitehead was a physician and religious man that we even willing to believe that the poor and destitute could have been the deserved receivers of this disease yet his cases said otherwise when the rich and “pristine” died. The environment was conducive to these deaths with their cramped quarters and limited sewage systems but the people were not to blame. In fact, now we recognize that “squatter communities… are where the developing world goes to get out of poverty” (Johnson).
I also found it amazing this spread of disease was exactly what helped contribute to modern cities. People had slowly developed to accomodate these larger populations and led to some of the advances we know today. The chapter focusing on risks in living cities did instill a sense of fear in me though, that we are so helpless if it comes to things such as nuclear warfare. Yet it also comforted me to know that biological warfare could be halted in a matter of days, that we had gotten so advanced from the times of London’s cholera outbreak. Admittedly, there are still diseases we must work to find cures for such as cholera and HIV but the advances made in modern medicine and city society is amazing.

This entry was posted by medinamishiyeva on Friday, February 14th, 2014 at 9:15 am and is filed under 02/14. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.