Category: McCoy 101 Fall 2017

“In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free

While God is marching on.”

– The last chorus of Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic

Throughout the myths and legends scattered across human history, the concept of a noble death is often romanticized. Whether it is the ancient practice of seppuku in Japanese culture, the numerous “Last Stands” across military history or the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth in the New Testament, examples of bravery in the face of death are littered across history. However, not all sources agree on what makes for a noble death. Continue reading “Walking into the Sea: Strength in the Face of Death”

Navigating through the flashbacks and complex vocabulary of Zone One proved to be a difficult path. Coupled with the fact that it centered on zombies did not necessarily make Whitehead’s novel my favorite read. Nevertheless,the plague’s devastating symptoms weave into the course’s analysis of human identity. Genna’s post, Identity and Disease, helped me to identify this theme in Zone One. Her disclaimer at the beginning of the post stating that she wrote it prior to reading Zone One actually helped me to frame my thinking to consider the novel’s relation to her ideas while reading her post.

Continue reading “The Complexity of Human Identity and Disease”

Scrolling through Facebook, I stumbled upon a link shared by an old friend of mine who is currently in the Peace Corps. Her posts always catch my eye, as she is stationed in Senegal and frequently posts pictures of her trip. However, this post caught my eye for a different reason–it discussed the precautions individuals should make when posting pictures from their trips abroad. I immediately saved the link for a future blog post, as it reminded me of our in class discussions and our future collective course statement on medical voluntourism.

Continue reading “The Power of Social Media”

I find this class really funny. It isn’t because the course material is something to laugh about or even that we crake jokes in class. It is however the fact that you don’t realize the stuff we are talking about in class is a problem until you are told about it. It is like all of a sudden the world is a different place; you suddenly see the problem everywhere you look. And the place that is shocked me the most: medical volunteerism. Professor McCoy talks about it and shows us an article about it and then all of a sudden, I can’t not find ways to connect it. Continue reading “The Barbie Savior”

*Disclaimer: this blog post was written prior to the reading of Zone One*

This blog post is inspired by my classmate Emma’s blog post titled “What does it mean to be “human?”. Emma’s blog post got me thinking about the article we read in class about how humans are actually just made up of microbes, the assigned article about how a parasite living fish eyeball controls its behavior and the disease in Clay’s Ark. Upon reading these 3 pieces of literature I am pondering the question, at what point does a disease take our identity? Continue reading “Identity and Disease”

After the apocalypse in Zone One by Colson Whitehead, drastic changes have been made in the political structure of the United States. America is now referred to as the American Phoenix, and Buffalo, NY is now the capital city. For those of us native to western New York, this pulls our heartstrings a little bit. It’s endearing and somewhat comical. However, what comes as more of a strange shock is that the bird that once represented our country–the bald eagle–has been dethroned and replaced with a fiery mythological bird Continue reading “The American Phoenix”

While  reading “The Painful Truth About Teeth” by Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan, I found myself comparing my dental experiences with other people’s experiences described in the article. I also found myself becoming irritated while I read the article and how quickly some people place their lack of attentive dental care on the president. Continue reading “Dental Coverage: You Have Options”

For those of you that don’t speak Latin (myself included), the title of my blog post reads “With the name changed, the story applies to you.” In class, we’ve read stories that had a tendency of revolving around the topics of racism, medicine, and literature (which is understandable given the course’s title).  Out of the six books and multiple online articles we’ve read this semester, I made a ‘both/and’ connection between Zulus by Percival Everett and Zone One by Colson Whitehead. Even though I’m not a fan of the doomsday genre of literature per se, I’ve realized that they’re inspiring nonetheless. The endings of both books leaves the reader to believe that the main characters follow through with the “forbidden thought” (suicide) like Professor McCoy explained to us. Continue reading “Mutato Nomine, De Te Fabula Narratur”

       Continuing Sakshi’s conversation in “Is Hope A Bad Thing?” on Zone One, I think that hope is a necessary component for change and transition. In Sakshi’s post, she discusses Mark Spitz’s connection between hope and the pre-apocalyptic world, in which Mark Spitz views hope as the equivalent to a “gateway drug” (222) because of the duality of its effects. While enveloping yourself in nostalgia may be a nice temporary reprieve, it is also dangerous to hold onto hope so tightly that it affects your safety in the situation you are currently in. Mark Spitz’s perspective is understandable, as hope is defined as a very risky precipice for his fellow survivors. However, I see hope as more of a middleman between the past and the future. Rather than feeling as if you are constantly on the brink of things, hope is an agent for a certain rite of passage. In Zone One, this rite of passage is named Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder (PASD). Continue reading “A Dose of Hope”

Everybody has some concept of some mythology that has been unearthed on the planet. The most common mythology anyone claims to know something of is mostly Roman, Greek, Norse etc. Mythology has been a part of human history since the beginning of civilization. There have been plenty of authors that have written their own interpretations of these myths, more famously Rick Riordan with his Percy Jackson/Heroes of Olympus series that delves into the Greek/Roman mythologies. The one thing each of these mythologies have in common though, is their own type of oracle/augur/psychic that will have a prediction about the future. It was brought up by Francesca in class on Monday, that when Mark Spitz and crew went in to see the psychic, it was sort of like some books I have read before that have to do with mythology.

The Oracle of Delphi was a crucial part of Greek Mythology, most of the heroes we’ve read about wouldn’t be as great as they are if the Oracle wasn’t there. The Oracle is the one who gave out the prophecies, or riddles that the hero was to decipher and work out to complete an assignment or quest. In Rick Riordan’s hit series, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Phoebus Apollo’s Oracle is placed within the Camp full of demigods (children of the Greek gods, half-human half-god) and she is who the young heroes go to seek counsel from when they have a questions, or a quest that needs fulfilling. In the books, the Oracle is described as having an air of reptiles or snakes wherever she walks, and the Oracle is described as ‘a human female body shriveled to a husk. The skin of her face was thin and leathery over her skull and her eyes were glassy white slits, as if the real ones had been replaced by marbles; she’d been dead a long, long time.’ (PJO: The Lightning Thief). The Oracle was integral in making heroes heroes, but without fail, whenever a prophecy was issued, chaos followed in the years to come until that Prophecy was fulfilled. The main prophecy in this series spoke of the second Titan War against the Greek gods, and how the demigod son of Poseidon can either save the world or let it die with a single choice (sorry for spoilers).

In Zone One, before Gary met his end by another one of his microaggressions, the trio of Mark Spitz, Kaitlyn and Gary happen upon a Fortune Tellers shop, and Gary wants to go in and get his palm read. Everything was going fine, and the straggler fortune teller wasn’t moving one inch as Gary laid his hand in her palm. But as soon as Gary moved his hand from hers, she moved and chomped down on Gary’s hand, sealing his doom, even though he tried to stave off the plague rushing through his body with ‘anticiprant’. The straggler fortune teller is described as having, ‘a hunk of the fortune-teller’s neck beneath her right ear was absent. The exposed meat resembled torn-up pavement tinted crimson, a scabbed hollow of gaping gristle, tubes, and pipes: the city’s skin ripped back.’ (Zone One). As in any mythology, after visiting the oracle to have a reading of the future, and having Gary’s thumb savagely bitten off, chaos ensued as pointed out by Prof. McCoy. In the streets all of the dead are surrounding the city, the few survivors are trapped in the building with no way out and it seems to be the end for our characters.