eBook

Pandemics, Publics, and Narrative

Lohm, Davina, Davis, Mark

2020

Overview

Pandemics, Publics, and Narrative explores how members of the general public experienced the 2009 swine flu pandemic. It examines the stories related to us by individuals about what happened to them in 2009, their reflections on news and expert advice given to them, and how they considered vaccination, social isolation, and other infection control measures. The book charts also the storytelling of public life, including the “be alert, not alarmed” messages from the beginning of the outbreak through to the “boy who cried wolf” problem that emerged later in the outbreak when the virus turned out to be less serious than first thought for most people. Key themes of the book are the significance of personal immunity for people as they reflected on how to respond to the threat of an influenza virus and the ways in which universal public health advice was interpreted quite differently by people according to their medical and biographical situation. The book provides unprecedented insight into the lives of ordinary people during 2009, some affected profoundly and others hardly affected at all. By drawing on currents in sociocultural scholarship of narrative, illness narrative, and narrative medicine, it develops a novel “narrative public health” approach that bridges health communications and narrative. The book provides therefore important new insights for health communicators and researchers across the social and health sciences.

• Publisher: Oxford University Press,Oxford University Press, Incorporated
• Subject: Epidemics / Epidemics -- History -- 21st century / H1N1 influenza / Health Psychology / Influenza Epidemic, 2009-2010 / Influenza Epidemic, 2009-2010-Personal narratives / Public health / Social interaction / Social Psychology
• ISBN: 0190683775, 9780190683771, 0190683767, 9780190683764