Library Trends: Introduction

By A. Black, Emily J. M. Knox. Library Trends, 2017

622 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Epidemics have their own particular biography. This Mortality special issue was commissioned as the secure acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was beginning to take hold in early 2020. The rapidly escalating infection rate provoked comparisons to the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 which caused 50 m deaths worldwide. Following months of extraordinary measures including lockdown and mass vaccination, ‘Covid’ has now been toppled from the headlines by the war in Ukraine. To date, the infection has caused more than six million deaths worldwide and although the disease continues to spread throughout the population, the likelihood of death has been tempered by vaccination regimes. Covid is almost – but not quite – becoming history. Human responses to mortality are always subject to scrutiny during periods of crisis that inflate the death rate far above its normal course. Death in these circumstances is often a bad death. The mode of death itself is alien. At the medical front line, mass mortality enforces a priority to save life where possible. In hospitals, there is limited time for sensitivity and compassionate gestures to console the dying, who are isolated from the comfort of family presence. Perhaps worse, many people will die at home without medical intervention to alleviate suffering. Disease control regimes have also diluted the consolation that can be drawn from funerary ritual. During Covid, every culture has been reminded about the funeral practices it holds most dear and most essential to meeting the needs of the dying, the bereaved and society more generally. The scope and range of the impact globally of the Covid pandemic on end-of-life experience, mourning practice, and rituals of disposal makes this collection a partial view on a landscape still unfolding. Erni and Striphas (2021) observed that ‘Covid was and remains so overwhelming because it is not one thing but many things simultaneously [. . .:] a series of crises superimposed with such pressure as to leave one wondering where even to begin at all’ (p. 212). Where to begin? And where to end, given the pandemic is ongoing. For their part, Erni and Striphas begin with the place of their own quite different pandemic experiences. John Nguyet Striphas was working up the edited collection in a Hong Kong convulsed by democratic protest and its repression. Sensitive to the threats of infection, authorities instituted mask-wearing, social distancing and hand hygiene, measures adopted with alacrity and ease by a population long used to them. Nevertheless ‘that deep memory contains not only the formation of a public health consciousness, but also that of a public culture of protest [. . .].the profound sense of a diminishing city marked by the intersection of a biological pathogen and a political disease’ (Erni & Striphas, 2021, pp. 217–218).

Subfields: Anthropology, Geography, Planning and Development, Sociology and Political Science

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