I sat by an election denier on the airplane and he started poking me in the arm to be emphatic about his views on people stealing ballots secretly and the airplane was full and I couldn’t move anywhere so I started explaining the yellow fever in very great detail, all the way down to telling him about the bloody vomit that looks like coffee grounds and it worked. He stopped talking to me. The moral of this story is you can’t out-weird an academic; our toolset is too vast. #vastearlyamerica
@kacytillman how on earth does a professor of English become an expert on yellow fever?
@yish oh that’s easy to explain. I’m a specialist in the 18th c. They suffered from it. They wrote about. I know about it.
@kacytillman @yish
<Checks what little I know about that period>
Oh... I bet you could have chosen many.
What did people write about more?
I guess stuff that affected the rich in particular? Gout? Poor teeth due to sugar? Smallpox? The Great Pox? Quack remedies for the above?
