Tomb of the Unknown Nurse

I think that Nancy Bristow raised a really great point. I mean why is it we don’t have memorials to those who died in the pandemic and those who fought that pandemic? We’ve got memorials for the soldiers who died in World War I. Well, medical professionals and volunteers knew that they were risking their lives by taking care of the sick, just like soldiers knew they were risking their lives by fighting in the war.

JOANNE: They knew that. The question is if you’re talking about how he remember those people, that’s a different question. That’s a question of how do other people perceive what they’re doing and that risk. And do they understand that there’s literally an invader that’s being attacked?

BRIAN: Right So I get it. So you’re saying that today in an age of antibiotics and where some people of course do die from the flu every year, but where we don’t have millions of people dying, today we just don’t recognize the heroism or those public health officials. Got it.

JOANNE: Or the threat, right? Or the threat. I mean, the fact of the matter is even just this year, there’s this sort of low hum of a refrain this year, of like, hey guys, like this year is a little more serious. Like, it’s a little more serious. People are actually dying. And it’s taken quite a lot for that message to even sort of begin to whisper its way into the public. I mean I just think maybe we do sort of take for granted, just as you’re saying, that well, it’s a disease and diseases have cures.

BRIAN: So your answer, Joanne, is that we’ve failed as historians.

JOANNE: Oh gosh.

NATHAN: That’s a nice optimistic note.

JOANNE: Gee, thanks, Brian.

BRIAN: I’m taking part of the blame. I mean the point is we have not been successful at letting people understand that first of all, more people died globally from this than World War I, for instance, and that the quote soldiers fighting it were risking their lives.

NATHAN: No. But I mean– but I think there is something to the effect that you get these diseases kind of every year. It’s now factored into being part of the rhythm of Americans’ lives.

JOANNE: Right. And you get a shot.

NATHAN: You get a shot. Exactly. And we feel as if it’s something that we kind of manage in the way that you manage an ulcer or something like that on a kind of societal level. But just to be very clear, I mean there aren’t many monuments to doctors, period, right? We tend to like building monuments to–

BRIAN: What do you mean, Nathan? You teach at one of them.

NATHAN: Well, [INAUDIBLE]. But even the Johns Hopkins University is not about the physicians necessarily. It’s about Johns Hopkins, the philanthropist, right?

BRIAN: Absolutely.

NATHAN: Yeah. But I think it’s also really key that you have a country that at a broad level of commemoration in its culture well build monuments to generals who lost the war, as we’ve been talking about for quite some time, rather than having the kinds of things that might reflect broad commitments by many thousands of people trying to fight back the ravages of a pandemic like flu.

And I think it’s also I think– as you point out, Brian, the tens and hundreds of thousands of people that are losing their lives to these diseases in some ways also become through the passage of time kind of faceless casualties, right? We don’t have a way of talking about the ravages of public health in K through 12 education. This isn’t part of the fables that we talk about America and how it’s able to conquer this or that. Even the eradication of polio, that word eradication it’s almost like a moment in time. But people don’t go back and think about how polio was really dealt with as part of the general education of most people. It ends up having to be a kind of flashpoint in more specialized conversation.

So all this to say, I think scholars certainly have, I think, been doing their work to try to get that narrative out there. But I think it’s also a heavier lift in terms of what kinds of things count as events for most Americans. And things like pandemics, for lack of a better word, really do fly under the radar for most of the time.

JOANNE: Well, an what’s a victory in that kind of a war?

BRIAN: Well, antibiotics and vaccines. That strikes me as every bit as much a victory as the one won in World War I, which most scholars would say led pretty directly to World War II.

JOANNE: Yeah. I mean I think there are victories like that. And we could name Jonas Salk. I mean we could name medical professionals who’ve done things that we remember. And we remember the person who created or innovated that particular discovery. But the–

BRIAN: Although you’re right, Joanne. No sooner is victory declared, then we completely forget about it because people don’t worry about that disease anymore. You take a pill. And what’s the big deal?

NATHAN: That’s the point. That’s the point of curing it.

BRIAN: Exactly.

NATHAN: To be forgotten.

JOANNE: Right, right. That’s exactly true. We’re trying really hard to forget about this thing.

BRIAN: So if I hear you correctly, you’re calling for the Tomb of the Unknown Doctor, or better, The tomb of the Unknown Nurse.