This year, the Department of History at Queen’s University is pleased to welcome Dr. Jason Opal to deliver the first lecture, "Rumors of Apocalypse: The Epidemics That Shaped (and Didn't Shape) British America, 1600s-1776," as part of our annual seminar series. The son of a professor at Brown University’s Alpert Medical School, Dr. Opal’s interest in his chosen topic—epidemics in British America—stretches back to childhood days spent wandering the halls at the Water Reed Army Medical Center. While the wealth of knowledge he gained studying under towering figures at Cornell University (Mary Beth Norton) and Brandeis University (Jane Kamensky, David Hackett Fischer, and James T. Kloppenberg) helped Dr. Opal produce both an award-winning article in the Journal of American History and two books on the cultural transformation of ambition in the post-Revolutionary New England countryside and reactionary politics in the age of Andrew Jackson, it was a 2005 piece published in the journal Military Medicine that dealt with the inoculation of the Continental Army which spurred his interest in the spread of disease. At present, Dr. Opal is working on, among other things, a forthcoming book with his father on six medical disasters that shaped North American history and teaching a new course at McGill entitled “History of Pandemics.” Last week, I sat down with Dr. Opal to discuss the origins of his interest in this topic and what it’s been like teaching “Pandemics” in the wake of COVID-19.
---
So, to start things off, I was hoping you might be able to tell me a little bit more about how you came to be interested in this field. Your early research was more focused on early America, so how did epidemics eventually factor into that?
I wrote my first bit about smallpox in the American Revolutionary War in 2003-2004, right when I had my first job as a professor. I did it because my dad, who is an infectious disease physician, was doing a forum at the time on whether there should be research into a new vaccine for smallpox, given that the disease was thought to no longer exist.
So, it was pure nepotism at first. He was like “Hey, can you give me some historical information?” and liked my work so we went ahead and published it in Military Medicine.
In addition, having grown up in a military medical family, I spent many weekends in my dad’s lab and developed a great interest in microbiology. In fact, I studied as much of it as I could being a history major could in college.
In 2018, I started writing a book with my dad about six different pathogens in American history, which has turned into a relatively long-term project. More recently, it’s started to overlap with my other work on Barbados because the early history of that colony is intimately tied up with the history of yellow fever and smallpox.
And since March 2020, I’ve found that being really engaged in the history of disease has helped me to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic and now it’s one of my standard classes. So, I’ve had long interest in the history of disease and of late, that’s blossomed into a passion for teaching about the history of pandemics.
I knew your dad was a Professor of Medicine at Brown, but I wasn’t aware of his military background. To what extent has he and his experience combatting infectious diseases been an influence on your work?
So, my dad is a physician and enlisted in the U.S. Army to cover the costs of his medical school. After he graduated, he was mandated to provide eight years of service and along the way, he was given the opportunity to conduct high-level research into what the military calls “tropical medicine” or infectious diseases.
The army’s interest in combatting these types of diseases extends back to the First World War when more American troops died of the so-called “Spanish Flu” than were killed in action, and they became acutely aware of the fact that wars can be won or lost on the basis of disease. It was at that point that we begin to see the beginning of vaccination campaigns and the development of a military-medical complex in the United States.
My dad doesn’t really see himself as being part of that: he’s just a doctor who happens to be in the military. But nevertheless, it’s been a big influence in my family. I have many memories of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, which is one of the leading research centers in the world, and in general I would say that that whole thing is just very familiar to me. Learning about the history of vaccination and the history of the U.S. Army’s relationship with medicine—which is very complicated—has definitely had a big influence on me.
What has it been like teaching on this topic in the wake of COVID-19 pandemic?
Well, after getting my course approved during the 2021-22 academic year, I taught it for the first time this past winter, which just so happened to be the first winter since 2020 that there was not a substantial COVID wave.
Speaking from a purely pedagogical standpoint, it was ideal because everyone was back on campus in a relatively low-risk environment and emerging from this unprecedented situation. I can say that I’ve never had a more motivated group of students. There were 80 of them and they were all in. I mean, this was an 8:30 Monday-Wednesday-Friday class. These are notoriously—and I’m not being anecdotal here, there is empirical evidence to back this up—unpopular classes in terms of enrolment, sometimes to the magnitude of 40-50%. And every week it was packed with extraordinarily enthusiastic students. While I certainly hope that I can duplicate that this winter, I’m realistic and doubt it will ever be that good again.
Part of that, as I’ll be discussing on Thursday, is that there are real reasons people try to forget pandemics, more than wars, more than famines. There are actually a number of particularities that point to why pandemics have disappeared from the historical record and there might even be a uniquely American dimension to this.
To keep a long story short, then, it was a great class to teach even if I didn’t teach it during the pandemic proper. I did, however, teach a class completely online on the American Revolution during the 2020-2021 academic year and in that I included two full sessions about smallpox. There, too, I found the response from students extraordinary. People were just so engaged and had this raw desire to learn, which was pretty cool to encounter as an instructor.
That sounds amazing. I wanted to ask too about the connection between this topic—pandemics—and colonial America. Do you feel like this remains a fertile site of historical research because people are so inclined to forget about the former?
I think it’s incredibly fertile and active. The example that comes to mind here is an article published in the American Historical Review in December 2020 about the origins of the plague entitled “The Four Black Deaths” by Monica H. Green. In that piece, Green uses new biomedical techniques to carbon date human remains and look at viral and bacterial reproduction, allowing her to make some major advancements in our understanding of one of the biggest events humanity has ever faced. And that was just three years ago.
I’ve started writing on the plague in America—which is to say, the absence of the plague in America—and it’s completely new. I corresponded with one paleo-archaeologist and we talked about rats being able to swim across 200 meters of open water if they were suffering from the late stages of the bubonic plague. All we could do really was spitball on a topic like that because, as I say, the whole thing feels very new, like untilled land. Really exciting stuff.
Okay, finally, are there ways in which you see your research into this topic as being informed by your position at a Canadian institution and as part of this country’s wider historiographical community? Are there certain ways in which the Indigenous element in all of this is dealt with differently north of the 49th parallel, as someone who has had experience on both sides of the border?
Yes, although I should start by saying that I don’t see a dramatic difference among academic historians in their interest, or involvement with, Indigenous communities. What I will say is that in cultures around academia and broader public sphere, there’s no doubt in my mind that the issues between the Indigenous and settler populations in Canada is far more of a part of Canadian public life than it is in the United States.
So, when working on this topic, I really try to approach it with two ethics. One is that I am not trained and not equipped to understand Indigenous ways of remembering the unimaginable, which is very much what occurred, and I have to be upfront about that. I might well be able to bring other tools or perspectives to the topic, but I don’t pretend to able to speak for both sides in this.
The other (I know this may sound corny but I’m quite serious) is that studying the history of disease and pandemics is a real encounter with human vulnerability. I’m confronted everyday with our frailty, the extraordinary feebleness of our own bodies; the horror of our corporeal selves which are simply no match, many times, for these pathogens. It’s very humbling and I think, if properly approached, it can be universalizing and remind you of your small share in humanity. If improperly approached then, as we’ll see on Thursday, it can become this sort of gloss on a providential narrative which claims that there was a design, and that design did not include Indigenous peoples.
Now, I see that more in the United States than in Canada, but in both cases, the belief was that if certain plagues brought about the elimination of these peoples, then that was destiny. Of course, no historian that I’m aware of would stand by those ideas, but we always have to be aware of the fact that if we’re not cautious in studying these things, we can tend to replicate them in our own work which I don’t want to do.
But to sum up, it would say that it’s the public profile—that’s the distinction. There’s a lot of really good work now that’s looking at not just integrating, but approaching these topics from Indigenous perspectives, but it does not have nearly the same public profile in the United States.
----
For more on Dr. Opal's upcoming talk, "Rumors of Apocalypse: The Epidemics That Shaped (and Didn't Shape) British America, 1600s-1776," check out the event page.
Edited for concision and clarity.
Disclaimer: Dr. Opal is the interviewer’s doctoral supervisor at McGill University.
