Bull Hist Med. 2020;94(4):727-743. doi: 10.1353/bhm.2020.0093.
To experience an epidemic while lying on a sickbed opens up other ways of thinking through time, epidemics, and sequence from those developed by Charles Rosenberg in his 1989 essay, "What Is an Epidemic?". In this essay, a patient recovering from COVID-19 analyzes how histories of epidemics often follow the logic proposed by the discipline of epidemiology itself: a focus on acute cases and on a tracking of the "peak(s)" often means that longer temporalities of suffering are hidden. In contrast, this essay follows "Long Covid"-an illness collectively made and named by patients, which changed how the natural history of a new disease (COVID-19) was being mapped out by conventional scientific experts. Long Covid conceptualizes time differently from common categories and prefixes used in medicine and epidemiology, such as the "chronic" or the "post-." The collective labor of ill people thinking from the sickbed-both those with Long Covid and those working to bring to visibility other illnesses and the sequelae of other epidemics-has allowed other possible arrangements of sick bodies, symptoms, and diagnostic classifications to come into view. These arrangements hold potential for historians of medicine, as well as for clinical scientists.
躺在病床上经历一场流行病，会让人从时间、流行病和序列等方面产生不同于查尔斯·罗森伯格（Charles Rosenberg）在 1989 年的文章《什么是流行病？》（“What Is an Epidemic?”）中提出的思路。在这篇文章中，一位从 COVID-19 中康复的患者分析了流行病的历史通常如何遵循流行病学本身学科提出的逻辑：对急性病例的关注以及对“高峰（s）”的追踪通常意味着隐藏了更长时间的痛苦。相比之下，本文遵循“长期新冠病毒病（Long Covid）”-这是一种由患者共同提出并命名的疾病，它改变了传统科学专家对一种新疾病（COVID-19）自然史的描绘方式。长期新冠病毒病从不同于医学和流行病学中常用的类别和前缀（如“慢性”或“后-”）的角度来理解时间。病床上的病人从他们的患病经历中进行集体思考的劳动——包括那些患有长期新冠病毒病的人和那些努力让其他疾病和其他流行病的后遗症可见的人——使得其他可能的患病身体、症状和诊断分类能够被看到。这些安排为医学史学家以及临床科学家提供了潜力。
