So can you just start by saying your name and your position in the video?
Sure. My name is Erica Charters. I'm a historian.
I'm an associate professor at the History Faculty, and my official title is Associate Professor of Global History and the History of Medicine.
Great. Thank you. And so, first of all, just you just tell me a little bit about yourself.
Starting from when you first got interested in history to how you came to be where you are now.
So I actually did not do an undergraduate in history.
I did an interdisciplinary undergraduate degree books, but I did a masters in history,
and I took a course on the history of disease and became hooked at that point.
So I did my doctorate at Oxford with you first.
So my first two degrees were in Canada and Carleton University in Ottawa and then University of Toronto.
And then I came to England to do a doctorate under Mark Harrison and Lawrence Brock Lewis, and that was on the history of medicine.
So I looked at disease during the seven years war in the British Army, in the British Navy.
And that was when I really, I think, really came into the fold.
And in terms of doing research in the history of disease and I taught at various universities,
but I started here as a historian of medicine here being the University of Oxford in 2009.
So some time. And if you have to define a single kind of big question that really sort of animates your interest in your subject, what would it be?
I think that so I work on because I work on war and I work on disease.
One of the things I've found is I'm very interested in the relationship between the physical and the tangible.
And I would say are more kind of cultural, intellectual ideas about our experience of life.
So I'm very interested in in bodies, but I think especially disease, because I find as a historian,
it's both a biological phenomenon, but it's also, of course, a social and political and cultural phenomenon.
And we need to have a framework where we can interpret this this physical and this biological experience of disease.
So in many ways, it's it's the tension between that kind of physical, biological and our our experiences as cultural and as as humans.
That really interests me. Mm hmm. So why do you think a long term perspective is important when thinking about disease and human society?
I suppose. I mean, I don't know when when I should start talking about it.
But of course, one of the things that strikes me is, especially when we talk about an epidemic, is that it's usually a moment of crisis.
And so I think when we're living through a moment of crisis than we have, we're thinking more immediately.
And I think to me,
the kind of fascinating thing about being a historian is when you realise that there's actually human patterns that might be universal,
some things that might not be. But obviously it's only when you have that long term context, then you can start to pinpoint and identify.
Ways in which this is a human experience rather than just a unique experience that we're living through now.
I find it comforting. I'm sure some people might find it.
Maybe it can seem boring, but to me actually there's something quite reassuring to know that what we're experiencing now,
other people have experienced before and that they developed techniques and methods of responding to it.
How good are we at remembering? Well, good question.
I think we're good at remembering some things. I would say we probably have a selective memory.
There's many things that we pass on. I have been struck, uh, when?
Whenever. Well, I have been struck by the way that people talk, especially about epidemics,
what it is that we remember of previous epidemics and how we tend to emphasise novelty.
And that's actually something I see in the other topic that I research, which is the history of war,
where we also tend to talk about every experience of war as novel and unprecedented.
And I think as a historian, it's actually very useful to be able to have that kind of historical distance,
to try to reflect on actually how that very often is not the case.
Some parts, I think, definitely are unprecedented and novel, but many things that we assume to be novel, I think actually are quite longstanding.
Yeah. Can you can you say that more about some examples of previous pandemics or epidemics that you think are relevant to thinking about this one?
So I was thinking how for historians of medicine, there's this, uh,
key article written by Charles Rosenberg called What Is an Epidemic that he wrote during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s based in America.
And it's a key text in the sense that I teach it to my students every year.
I've been reading it and rereading it now for 15, 20 years.
And that's an interesting text in that Rosenberg uses the text to argue that in some ways all epidemics are the same and therefore can be compared,
and that they, they have a, um, a social and cultural framework and follow a certain progression.
And that's how we make sense of them. And but I was struck when I was reading it how much of the language he uses.
So he talks about how, you know,
we've never lived through an epidemic in which there's been so much media reporting in which people have been so reflective about being an epidemic,
how we've never lived through an epidemic in which when we thought that there would be no more epidemics to worry about.
And of course, that strikes me as being interesting to read that coming from the 1980s and then to be teaching it and rereading it now during COVID,
when people actually say similar things,
I think it's a it's an interesting example of the kind of cyclical nature of what we remember and then what we forget very quickly.
So there's ways in which I think you could say that historians have tended to argue that actually all epidemics have an underlying similarity.
But of course, that's also a dangerous assumption, I would say,
because the more I've done research to me there's also a bigger question of when something is called an epidemic,
because we can actually see in the historical record for some of the periods that I look at in the 18th century,
that people might not have seen what they were living through as a, as a discrete, uh, medical crisis that they would have called an epidemic.
But there were a lot of people dying, but there were lots of people dying from disease.
And in retrospect, we might want to say, well, according to quantitative measurements, perhaps that's an epidemic.
So I think there's also there's a there's a way in which the historical record can get
us to think about what we should categorise as being an epidemic and why we do so.
Hmm. So what narrative tools do you have available to you and how do you explore the narrative of an epidemic like the one that's happened already,
one that's set in progress? So I'm I'm very much a traditional historian in that I work with archives.
I work mostly on the 1700s. So I work on very often the letters, the correspondence, sometimes of officials.
Often I'm interested in those who are writing, who aren't actually medical experts,
but how they write about disease, um, and partly when they think disease is a problem.
One of the things that I'm interested in is,
I suppose this question of when do people feel that they should remark and observe on disease and when actually is disease so,
uh, almost so widespread that it's not even worth commenting on.
Can you give an example?
So I suppose the that is, I actually work more on endemic disease on um, during the 18th century on what they call crop diseases.
So things that we would recognise as typhus, um, kind of low grade fevers, things like that,
which were very common amongst anyone living in urban populations and even things like smallpox, which of course was endemic.
So it was common in urban centres but was um considered an epidemic in rural areas.
So I'm interested in how of course people therefore didn't necessarily comment on these rates of disease and yet they were quite fatal.
And then there are certain points at which disease becomes a problem, and especially because I'm working on war,
as you can see, when disease becomes something that you say encourages people to debate foreign policy,
or they might exploit reports of disease in order to criticise, um, political positions or in order to criticise military strategy.
So I'm kind of interested in how disease isn't necessarily a problem in the historical record.
Some diseases are, and at other times they're just not remarked upon,
even though you can kind of tease out that actually it's a it's a it's a constant presence in most people's lives.
So it's finally arrived? Yeah. Can you remember where you were, what you were doing when you first heard about it,
or how you became aware that actually it wasn't just something that affected some people in a city in China?
I do remember when I have to say that the origins are murky,
which is interesting that I remember when we were talking about it, and I remember across what in Oxford is Hillary's term?
Across February there was a lot of discussions.
Um,
I remember in March realising that the kind of attention that we were paying to this disease seemed different than some of the other diseases were.
All very often it seemed like a false alarm.
And one of the reasons I remember that is because I got invited to go on BBC NEWSNIGHT, because I worked on the history of disease.
And up to now, no one's been that interested in this kind of disease.
So that was clearly a ah marked difference. Um, and I also remember this kind of feeling across March of a kind of,
maybe there was an impending doom and people were talking about when lockdown was going to happen and what form it would take.
Um, so you, you just had a sense that something different was coming and yet no one knew exactly what kind of form that might be.
So I don't remember the exact discussions early on about COVID,
but I do remember a kind of it felt like an unrolling of a different feeling about this outbreak.
And at what point did you realise that this was something that you as a historian had a contribution to make to it?
So and I suppose I would have been across.
Starting maybe in March, April and May of 2020.
For me, this was very different. As a historian, I'd always been.
I think what I research is interesting and I think it's significant, but I don't usually think that it's of direct relevance to people's lives.
And I remember because borders were closed, I knew I couldn't go to archives.
I was now teaching my students online. And so the context of discussing the history of disease was completely different.
And so for the first time in my career,
I worked with some other historians and I edited a special issue that looked at the history of medicine and science in the context of COVID.
And it was a very I remember very intense working process.
And what was very interesting,
I was contacting scholars who were based all over the world to get them to to write short pieces in the context of lockdown.
So what they could draw on,
but reflecting on their expertise and their scholarship and how COVID was making them rethink that or how this might help us think about COVID.
And so that was a very different experience for me to be saying maybe history actually might be relevant and in fact it might be of direct relevance,
not necessarily. Maybe it won't reshape policy, but it might help people.
It might help people to maybe digest some of their experiences and again,
to put it into this long term context and to realise that a lot of the practises and a lot of the fears we have,
a lot of the anxieties that we have also have a history and I think to give people the kind of vocabulary perhaps to be able to,
to discuss that and to think.
Also what I thought was very fascinating is of course when you have different histories in different contexts than people realise,
of course there's a variety of ways in which you can respond to an epidemic and to all of the pressures that, that, that, that provides.
So I remember that as being very new because since then I've done much more research that's
been more directly relevant and that explicitly discusses COVID in historical context.
But we'll move on to that. So this was a special issue of which on this it's called Centaurus.
Yes, it's the journal for that's put up by the European Society for the History of Science.
And I mean, can you pick out from that a couple of particular approaches that your colleagues took?
Yeah. So there was a there's a really I mean, there's a range of topics I thought was very interesting.
For example, a colleague here at Oxford who's now retired, Margaret Pelling,
who has worked on cholera in the 19th century, worked on early modern diseases.
And she wrote an article talking about the concept of excess mortality and the definition of an epidemic.
And I remember even though she's retired, she still very research active.
And it was interesting to talk to her when she felt that all this research that she'd been doing for many years across her entire career,
she could now kind of mobilise to a different audience.
There's a really thoughtful contribution by two anthropologists who'd had to leave.
I think it was to leave West Africa very quickly. So it's an article by Geissler Prince where they talked about the context of
how to think about COVID in Africa and pointed out that where they worked,
there was still traces of Ebola. There was still in some ways, well, there's still tuberculosis, high rates of cancer.
And so, from their perspective, COVID was part of what they called one long epidemic.
And I thought that was, again,
this very useful reminder about these different perspectives and what gets classified as an epidemic and into what context is being introduced.
And so, again, getting us to rethink the novelty, I suppose, of some of this.
Mm hmm. So you mentioned that you did move on to focus your research more on things that were relevant to COVID.
So, yeah, tell me a little bit more about that. Yes.
So we published this special issue, and I think that was kind of a it was like a heady adrenaline rush was very fast,
I think we'd never done and the Journal said they'd never done something in such a quick turnaround because it came out before.
Yeah. So it was really a space of a few months and a very collaborative project in that sense with reviewers and everyone coming on board.
And part of that, someone who contributed to that special issue, who works on early modern builds mortality in London and Kristen Heitman.
We'd started discussing the epidemic and she she'd asked this question about how,
you know, it would be really nice to have a conference talking about how epidemics and.
And the more I had discussions with other people across the end of 2020,
it just kept coming up as this question I realised in my historical research I didn't
actually know how epidemics and and it just kept nagging at the back of my brain.
And even though I had this plan that I was supposed to be working on a much more standard book to do with French history,
it was clear across 2020 that wasn't going to be normal research.
And so Chris and I worked together and we ended up assembling, I think there's about 35.
Scholars who are working on different parts of the world.
They all work on epidemics, but they're from different disciplines.
And the idea is to bring them together and to see how they answer the question of how epidemics end.
And I think what's to me, what's interesting about the project is, of course, different disciplines have different ways of answering that question.
And I think actually, of course, disciplines probably disagree with each other.
We've seen a lot of work from mathematical modellers during COVID.
So I think there's a a dominance of having quantitative approaches.
Historians tend to be thinking about social and cultural endings and.
And so what I like about the project is it's a way to bring those people together and to discuss what it is that we measure when we say an epidemic
is ending and how those those factors that we're measuring actually might not they might be different and they might be in conflict with each other,
but also, therefore, how this process of ending is a kind of negotiation.
So we did some workshops, online workshops early in 2021.
And basically there's a number of what we're calling case studies right now.
People are writing short pieces, either talking about a previous epidemic and how it ended,
or thinking about how they're disciplined and what kind of methodology they use for ending.
And that will be coming out in a special issue in early 2022.
So give me some examples of different ways you might think of an epidemic as ending.
So, for example, we have a historian, Sam Cohen, who works on, especially on, uh, say on many things,
but he's focussed on Renaissance Italy and he's been interested in the celebrations that happen upon ending a plague.
So he's pointed out that actually, of course, although in general we tend not to notice when an ending happens because in some ways I would
say what happens when an epidemic ends is that we become focussed on more interesting things.
So in some ways the way that, you know, an epidemic has ended is because we stop paying attention to the epidemic.
And he's found these cases of the fireworks and the celebrations and the parades and whatnot that
go on at the ending to kind of point out that you can also see when epidemics end with a bang.
And so this need for these kind of cultural and social rituals to mark an ending.
There's a number of mathematical modellers who've written a literature review of the way in which modelling works to define an ending,
which of course is very focussed on tracking a decline in the number of cases.
And again, it's a complete contrast with what you find with some of the anthropologists.
And indeed we have one anthropologist who's written about a disease in Brazil
that he's pointed out has never really been declared as being an epidemic.
And so in some ways therefore will have no end because it's not defined as being a problem disease.
So you can kind of see how there's just these very different approaches to identifying what is an epidemic,
but also what factors and what variables you're trying to to pin down and measure.
When you talk about something ending end that even with a quantitative approach, you don't necessarily mean there are no more cases?
No, and I think so for the project, Chris and I published what we called a framework piece to kind of start off the discussion.
I think one of the the main points and again, I think this might come from my background in working on endemic disease is that of course,
there's not ever a time when there's no disease in the world.
And so actually, of course, if we were to think about epidemics in the context of endemic disease,
then what we are really looking at here, fluctuations and cycles rather than something like a full stop.
And so and I think this is why, especially with a novel disease such as COVID,
it really does open up these broader questions because of course, there's no baseline level to which the disease is going to return.
And so as a historian and a humanities scholar, to me, that's where I feel very strongly.
This is why this needs to be a kind of a multidisciplinary discussion,
because there's not going to be a number that's going to answer when the epidemic is going to end.
It's going to have to be a discussion where all of society is involved to try
to come to some kind of negotiated agreement or maybe just a disagreement,
which could mean a just a level of acceptance that it's become endemic and will always have.
It'll always be around. Yes, I agree.
And I think and again, this is why I'm I'm I'm fascinated by endemic disease, because I think this notion that the clinical definition is about,
I quote unquote, normal or acceptable rate, and that's fascinating to me that we have accepted certain things and certain diseases and certain rates.
And again, that means that this is something that a society decides.
It's not necessarily a medical question or a biological question.
Rather, it's about humans deciding how they live with disease and in what ways they live with it.
And that rather leads us to this concept of excess deaths, which I think you've looked at in in terms of deaths and in warfare.
Yeah. What's regardless acceptable. Yeah. But that also has a bearing, doesn't know what we regard as acceptable in in diseases.
Yes, I so it's it's again, I think this is something that I've been working on recently, kind of returning back to my history of war work.
But it's been a big talk. Yeah, I do have a big talk coming up.
But it's it's a it's an interesting point to me because I think, um, you know,
were I to give I'm giving this talk on what is called the metrics of war.
So the history of, of measuring casualties in wartime, but also the concept of of excess death.
And of course, if I was giving this talk three years ago, the term excess mortality or excess death would not have been widely known.
But now in this context, um, I would suggest that we're living through a period in which you could say we were numerate, right?
In which people use numbers and talk about numbers and read things containing numbers and just more frequently,
um, and, or thinking about concepts such as excess death and excess mortality.
And again, what interests me there is you can only really call something excess if you have it compared with something that's acceptable.
And again, that that doesn't have a number on it.
Again, that's a decision that's often political or social. And I don't find that there's a clear historical pattern.
You know, I'd like to tell a narrative where we suddenly move towards the modern age and we have lower rates of acceptable excess mortality.
But that's not always true. We still have very violent wars, just like we have very fatal diseases throughout different parts of the world.
So it strikes me that there's not a, there's not a, uh, a kind of satisfying historical narrative,
but there's ways in which we can think about how we've become more interested in numbers and in precise numbers.
And I think they hold a lot of authority in our lives.
But the question is still who makes the decisions and how we use those numbers when we're making decisions?
I'm just to put some figures on it.
I think that these are examples that you just how many people have died of COVID relative to say how many died in World War Two?
Yeah, so I won't know. There's no way I can know exact numbers.
But one of the things I was struck by, I've, I've been looking at, um, I mean, partly I think it's a proportion of population,
partly, of course, it's a very interesting notion that we might even have an exact figure,
a population which again is a, is a recent to the fact that we have some notion of our population now is a fairly recent phenomenon and of course,
really only in some parts of the world. So when we talk about this data, it's in some ways exact only for certain areas and in certain times.
But I was also really struck by, was looking at, uh,
death records for a village in England during one of the plague epidemics, I think at 1646 and 47.
And they have a list of everyone they bury during a plague epidemic,
and it ends up counting up to about 20% of the entire villages population was buried.
And that's a very striking number when you think about it, especially this small village and what kind of,
um, social disruption took place across just three or four years.
Um, COVID has been devastating, but again is a much smaller number.
But I think again, the fact that we want to even compare these numbers and if we even think it's satisfying to say,
oh, well, if it's only this percent, then it's only that percent.
And I think it's the same thing. You get into discussions with wars when people say, Oh, it's only 100,000 as opposed to say 600,000,
and you start to realise that this is where I think the numbers give us some insight,
but it's actually of course very limited and there's other ways in which we want to be making our decisions.
Did you need to raise funding for your job to take your work in this direction?
I did so. I applied for grants and had internal university funding and internal welcome funding to run the projects, which is very useful.
I think one of the things that I realised is,
and I'm sure that this is I actually think it's an interesting point about the process of ending is I think,
you know, as I said, the first special issue in 2020, there was a kind of heady adrenaline rush of being in a crisis.
And I think now in 2021 and the end of 2021, and I keep thinking it's only been two years, but you can see how the adrenaline at least has gone.
And I think a lot of people in the project where I'm working with were in different parts of the world.
Um, it's not even about money, it's about time and energy.
And I think people are now dealing with not just COVID, but the kind of maybe we can call the fallout of COVID.
And so you can see how it's an interesting point about different stages.
And yet I keep being reminded of cycles of plague and which was 20 years or a cycle of 50 years or even longer.
And so, again, as you mentioned at the start, this this long term perspective and what it reminds us of is that,
you know, it can seem like forever to us, and yet it's really only been two years.
And actually that's a very short period of time in the grand scheme of our lifetimes as well as.
In the scheme of history. So how has the historical research that you or colleagues or any, for instance,
had, to your knowledge had any impact on policy or practise in public health?
I do know that there have been I have some colleagues who've been involved in policy work, especially, I think,
thinking not just about disease per se, but thinking about social responses to disease, but also to public health restrictions.
Because I think, again, that's a very interesting part of this, is if you work on the history of public health,
what you might find as familiar and what you might see as unfamiliar during this pandemic.
I, I don't know if I can pinpoint precisely anyone who said this is what they've done that might have shaped policy per se.
And my sense is the decision making that goes into policy must be so complex.
I'm never sure what what feeds into it.
So I definitely would say, at least in my experience, what's been interesting is just talking to a broader audience,
but also talking with people who I would call science and medical practitioners
who perhaps up to now we might kind of know that I work on the history of disease,
but I've been part of panels. I gave a kind of closing talk to medical Congress.
And so that's been very interesting. It's a feel like that hadn't happened before.
No, I don't. Yes. And so that's what I was going to say, is that it's obviously I think for me, it's a very weird thing being a historian.
Obviously, for most historians, research has kind of slowed down or stopped or been frustrated.
And I feel like I've been much more active than I've ever been before.
But also it's been to me very it's been very enjoyable and very stimulating to have these different
audiences and to be having discussions with different with different people and to be thinking precisely.
I think like this epidemics, ending projects,
do disciplines actually agree or actually in some ways do they are they focus on very different processes?
Have you had to find a new language to talk to people in these different disciplines, or has that been relatively straightforward?
It's been relatively straightforward, I think.
There was one I did do a presentation in which I realised that, uh, the, obviously I think if you do medical research,
you do things like send your PowerPoint and your references beforehand and uh, I think a historian will appreciate this.
They were asking for copies of all my references, and many of them were books,
and I think they just never dealt with anyone who uses books as references instead of articles that are freely available online.
And I think that kind of stumped everyone because I had never thought about books as being an unusual source.
But I think the the language itself, I don't think is that different.
And actually, I think that's been one of the and it shouldn't be surprising.
Right. But I think that the only difference is for me, probably no, I'm interested in disease,
but I'm interested in the relationship between disease and society.
And so obviously what I'm bringing is an emphasis on these social aspects, and that's obviously a bit different.
But I think this is precisely to me what gets at the heart of an epidemic,
which is thinking about it as this social phenomenon, not just not just the disease in and of itself.
Because I think if you're only tracking the disease, then it's very hard to make sense of what's going on.
So what impact did the disease have on on you personally when it started in terms of how you were able to work, conduct your life?
Actually, the I think I've been very lucky.
I think like many academics, because my a lot of things that I, I that I can use are online.
Um, I've been able to continue on and in some ways because I did this pivot away from my original research project,
which would have required archives and international travel to, I would say, this kind of new area of research that I've been able to work around it.
So in that sense, it's the the closures which and the uncertainty which obviously is a problem.
But I also feel that in many ways, because I was able to continue to do my research and I could actually engage with the broader audience.
I know I've been very lucky. I think the teaching.
Teaching online has been an interesting experience and I, I, I think we might not have realised how crucial.
Actually the human the human interaction that's required and that it you can kind of make do with online teaching.
But one of the things that has been very difficult to see is how for students,
even though we could say they can still read books online, they can still have discussions with me and other students online.
It's quite clear that the kind of in-person research community and the informal nature I think, of,
of intellectual discussion and intellectual enquiry is very crucial to the process of learning.
And so that's obviously something that has. That has been held up due to COVID restrictions.
And in the studio, it's affected the well-being of your students or even your colleagues.
I think it has. I think. I always think even though we have this image of research and scholars as being these kind of lone, lone bookworms.
I think scholarship is actually a very social activity.
And I think especially for I've seen it with my undergraduates, but I think they in Oxford were very lucky to have this collegiate atmosphere.
But I think especially for, say, doctoral students who are already in some ways doing isolating work,
I think this experience of of being isolated, physically isolated and therefore also socially and intellectually isolated has been very difficult.
And I think Oxford is a has been a strange experience because of the huge international
community of students and I think especially for the the the previous academic year.
So 2020 to 2021 when we had international students who arrived and then lockdown happened and many of them hadn't yet made friends with anyone else.
And then of course, that was, that option was kind of taken away from them.
Um, so I remember kind of one of the last classes before we were, we were moving to teaching online.
One of the students saying, can you please just keep teaching us in person?
Because they, of course, were allowed to leave their rooms if it was for educational purposes.
And so for them, having a class in person just meant a huge amount.
And obviously up to then you kind of take an in-person class for granted.
But so I do feel on the if if we could be optimistic about it and obviously people have dealt with all sorts of much more serious problems.
But I feel like we'll never take the in-person teaching for granted again.
And the way in which it's very important to have a, uh, a social as well as intellectual community for the student.
I mean, is there a positive side to the online side of it as well?
It is true that you get a lot of people coming to the talks into seminars and you can have people all together.
Um, one of the first things that actually we started during the very, very first lockdown,
I guess in March or April is we did an online reading group which we called kind of revisiting the history of medicine, um, with the grad students.
And people were all over the world.
The students were, many of them were, some of them were in hotel quarantine in foreign places, very anxious and upset.
But we'd come together once a week and do a kind of in some ways very old fashioned reading group reading some of the classes.
So reading. Rosenberg, reading these things that I've taught forever.
But the fact that we could all do it online, even though everyone was apart, I think was it was very reassuring.
So it's a very strange mixture of the new and the old. Yeah.
And. I mean, this is the question I've got.
This is this genetically modified that will take on it.
Why do you think it's been difficult to medical science to some extent to achieve
consensus the in essentially in the advice that they give to government.
I mean let's leave this like the most difficult it's being for governments to decide what to do.
But even within the medical community, there hasn't been unanimity about what the best approach is.
I mean, I guess I would say as a historian, why would we assume that there would be consensus?
Obviously, there is usually competing theories and there's competing frameworks.
And and, of course, some people would argue even the way that science.
Develops is by having competing theories.
You could add into the mix having a novel disease.
But it strikes me that if if you do think and I guess I do think as a historian,
that medical research and scientific research takes place within a a social and cultural context.
And that doesn't undermine it at all, I don't think. But if it takes place in that context, then you are bound to have competing theories.
And I also think I mean, maybe this is the historical point.
It always strikes me that it amazes me how even you can read about an epidemic that happened 300 years ago and historians are still debating,
was it caused by this or was it caused by that? So it strikes me that even if we think now, we will figure it out in the next five years,
there's actually a very high likelihood, according to the historical record,
that we will be constantly uncovering not only new research, but maybe new ways of thinking about the problem and defining what that problem is.
So I suppose I'm not entirely surprised by a lack of consensus.
So did you to an extent, feel personally threatened by the virus?
Did you think it was very. I look, I feel lucky.
And maybe this is the kind of thing that people say before bad luck happens to them.
But in terms of age group and health, I think I'm fairly lucky.
If I were to get ill.
I think because of the nature of my lifestyle that I'm used to travelling, it was the restrictions that were much more noticeable to me.
My family and my close family are not based in this country.
And so that's one of the things that probably affected me much more so actually, than than fear of the disease.
And to me, maybe this is the interesting point about epidemics is there's different parts of it that will affect people in very different ways.
So I feel like it's it's wrapped up in responses to the disease as well.
And what about people around you? I mean, have you have you had close friends or colleagues will sick with COVID?
I have had friends and colleagues fall ill with it with COVID.
And luckily no one seriously.
My husband got COVID in the summer and surprisingly we didn't realise for four days and I somehow didn't get it.
And it actually struck me because I was reading about the 1918 influenza epidemic at
the same time and how they'd done a survey in one of the US or cities to see the rates
of household infection and how they were surprised at this that a 50% rate of people
even living in the same household in very close quarters not catching influenza.
And so again, it made me realise that it's it's so hard to kind of disentangle our personal experience,
this kind of anecdotal experience to from this broader, more kind of population level statistical experience.
And then even to put that into a historical context. Yeah. So I feel like I said I feel very lucky.
And did you work longer hours than normal, you say?
I did. I did. I but I will also say the so the building we're in right now, which is the extreme medicine and science building.
And I remember when the offices reopened and we could come in with that.
It must have been I think we reopened right for the start of the 2020 academic year.
So somewhere around September, October, I remember we were working on the paperwork to reopen and coming to our offices
and it was a very strange thing and that of course it was just the researchers,
so not the administrative staff who could come in. And I remember how much I miss my office and then also my colleagues and how it was this weird
thing in which there were just a few of us coming in but very regularly working very long hours.
But again, I think this is part of, to me, the interesting point of coming back and feeling like you were part of a research community.
We have a library downstairs in the bottom floor.
And so we were amazingly lucky that we can access that library, even though there was no library staff.
And so, for example, when the Epidemic Centre Project,
I just spent a lot of hours in that library just taking books off the shelf to read about every step and stomach I could find.
So, yeah, so it was a, it was a, it was very nice to be back and be able to access the research space and to work with other researchers.
And you've talked about teaching. Yeah. Do you think the fact that you were able to work on something,
that you had a real mission help to support your own well-being at a time when a lot of people just felt rather helpless?
Yes, I do.
And I think I think there was actually a point when because I remember thinking when I took on the new project, do I really have time for this?
And the truth is, I don't, because I took on major projects on top of normal teaching duties.
And I think many of us felt that the administrative and teaching load, of course, increased.
But I also felt actually because otherwise I felt like I was living in a kind of uncertain world.
And I agree that, you know, again,
I would say historians would point out that epidemics are just this kind of crisis in which the world becomes out of control.
Right. You don't know anymore what is going to happen.
And so then we might develop all these techniques to try to impose some kind of control on it.
And for me, I really did feel lucky that I could use my research,
this historical expertise that I felt like I've been able to enjoy for so many years,
but to focus it into something and to feel like I was productive and not feeling like I'm changing the world because I'm
quite aware that there's people who are doing all sorts of research and policy work that really is changing the world,
but at least gave it a kind of meaning for myself and maybe for, you know, media colleagues.
So how do you think future historians will frame the global response to COVID 19?
Good question. I mean, I will say again, I think historians don't agree about things.
I remember I was having a discussion with a friend at the start of medicine and she was saying there should be more historians directing policy.
And I was kind of saying, well, but there's not a historical consensus.
Historians don't agree about epidemics from 200 years ago.
We disagree about those.
And of course, that's actually why it's interesting to be a historian, because obviously we all agree that we nothing to talk about.
So I can imagine in all sorts of ways that there will be a revision even in 50 years and 80 years.
I can imagine that there will be completely new frameworks.
And I suppose the thing that actually I think is most satisfying is that we
really cannot predict how people in the future will interpret what we've done,
even if we seem very certain of what is going on.
I do think that the the historical perspective should remind us that people will look at us many years
later and kind of be astonished at what we thought was was obvious or right or what upsets us now.
And they will be surprised and they will need to work hard to try to explain to future generations and in good ways and bad ways what we did.
When I think I'm sort of probably wondering whether in in 100 years time.
I guess it depends how many pandemics we have. Yeah. I mean, the last really major pandemic that gets talked about was the 1918 influenza pandemic.
But in fact, most people, that's probably true to say, are very unaware of it and certainly very unaware of the massive mortality that was associated.
Yes, that's true. That's true. Yes, that is true, I think in terms of a proportion of the population.
But again, interestingly enough, we're 1918. We don't have data from all parts of the world.
So it's still kind of guesstimate. And of course, I think it's also it's an interesting point, even if we can kind of figure out what is cause,
because it's mixed in with all sorts of other events that were going on in 1918.
Um, yeah. So it's a, you know, to come back to your original point, do we get to discover it anew each time?
Will it change our framework and our way of thinking about our relationship with disease?
I think it's you know, the one thing historians should not predict since the historical record,
you know, has told us how how terrible we are predicting.
Yeah. So how's the work you've been doing this year?
Raised new questions that you're interested in exploring in the future?
It has. I mean, it's in some ways it's in some ways it's return me back to it reminds me of why I love doing historical research,
why it is that I've always found, as you said, fascinating. But I become very I was partly interested already in the history of measurement,
but I become much more interested in the history of measurement, but also thinking more carefully about what it is that we measure.
And I suppose, one, I mean, this comes back to some of your opening questions.
But of course,
something I've been really thinking about is the sources that we have when we're studying the past because because we're so consciously archiving.
Now, it's a very interesting question to think about what people think is historically significant in the time that they're living through
and then what people will wish that we had archived 100 years from now and that we just didn't think of as being all that important.
So we've been thinking a lot more about the sources we have and the sources that we don't have and why
it is that those in the past measured some things which we would not measure or to to also help us.
You know, I am kind of curious, though, with what we're measuring today and what we're not measuring,
is there anything we're not measuring that you think should be?
I think there's I mean, there's it's an interesting point about what we can measure, I guess, for the academic sending project.
I think it's a very interesting point about how we would like I think we would like tangible, quantitative, we would like precise numbers.
And I think this is where the my work on war and disease slightly ties together because I do think in times of crisis.
Numbers are very. In some ways they're soothing because they seem to give us with the kind of certainty in what is an uncertain time.
But the but I think there's also fundamental things that are very difficult for us because we cannot quantitatively measure them.
And I think as a humanities scholar, it's those are the things that often I think are the most important.
When I think about my students and their experience or when I think about welfare issues, those are things that are much harder to put a number on.
And yet I think this is why I'd like to be able to articulate their historical significance.
I think that may have covered my final question, which was the experience of how we changed your attitude or your approach to your work.
And is there anything you'd like to see change in the future? Goodness.
You know, if that's an interesting question,
partly because I think historians have this kind of underlying point about whether or not epidemics changed society.
One of the things I've been struck by is how the question that I get asked the most like this was the question I think BBC,
NEWSNIGHT wanted me to answer was How have epidemics changed society?
And I felt as a historian of disease, it's it's kind of the wrong question, right?
Because I don't think disease is external to society.
And so I actually don't think this is when we ask the question in that way, it suggests that disease kind of acts upon us.
And actually because I think because disease is so enmeshed within society.
I also have this kind of pet theory that I've been working through, which is, does it actually change us?
Or does it confirm a lot of principles and values and beliefs that we already had in place and perhaps actually reinforce them?
And I think it's because historians are interested in continuity as much as they're interested in change.
So I suppose I actually do. Sometimes I can kind of say to myself,
I feel like many of the things that I already thought were very important and that I
wanted to do in my work might have been reaffirmed rather than substantially changed.
And perhaps it's been a very useful reminder of what I think is important and
why why I enjoy doing historical research and why I think it's so important.
Great. Thank you very much.