The nineteenth-century invention of smallpox vaccination in Great Britain has been well studied for its significance in the history of medicine as well as the ways in which it exposes Victorian anxieties regarding British nationalism, rural and urban class struggles, the behaviors of women, and animal contamination. Yet inoculation against smallpox by variolation, vaccination’s predecessor and a well-established Chinese medical technique that was spread from east to west to Great Britain, remains largely understudied in modern scholarly literature. In the early 1700s, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, credited with bringing smallpox variolation to Great Britain, wrote first about the practice in the Turkish city of Adrianople and describes variolation as a “useful invention,” yet laments that, unlike the Turkish women who variolate only those in their “small neighborhoods,” British doctors would be able to “destroy this [disease] swiftly” worldwide should they adopt variolation. Examined through the lens of Edward Said’s Orientalism, techno-Orientalism, and medical Orientalism and contextualized by a comparison to British attitudes toward nineteenth century vaccination, eighteenth century smallpox variolation’s introduction to Britain from the non-British “Orient” represents an instance of reversed Orientalism, in which a technologically deficient British “Occident” must “Orientalize” itself to import the superior medical technology of variolation into Britain. In a scramble to retain technological superiority over the Chinese Orient, Britain manufactures a sense of total difference between an imagined British version of variolation and a real, non-British version of variolation. This imagination of total difference is maintained through characterizations of the non-British variolation as ancient, unsafe, and practiced by illegitimate practitioners, while the imagined British variolation is characterized as safe, heroic, and practiced by legitimate British medical doctors. The Occident’s instance of medical technological inferiority brought about by the importation of variolation from the Orient, which I propose represents an eighteenth-century instance of what I call medical techno-Orientalism, represents an expression of British anxiety over a medical technologically superior Orient—anxieties which express themselves as retaliatory attacks on the Orient and variolation as it is practiced in the Orient—and as an expression of British desire to maintain medical technological superiority over the Orient.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, increased burdens have been placed on the Arizona healthcare system, and its healthcare providers. Using a survey with a sample of N=308 prescribing providers and nurses in the Arizona healthcare system, the impact of COVID-19 on the wellbeing of healthcare providers was assessed. The survey used measures to evaluate for physical and emotional wellbeing, burnout, stressors associated with COVID-19, and work-life experiences, and found an overall negative impact on the wellbeing of healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic with increased levels of reported stress and tiredness, concern for the health of family and loved ones, concern for the hardships of patients, lack of alignment between organizational priorities and personal values, and low levels of support and appreciation from socially and from leadership at work.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in preventative measures and has led to extensive changes in lifestyle for the vast majority of the American population. As the pandemic progresses, a growing amount of evidence shows that minority groups, such as the Deaf community, are often disproportionately and uniquely affected. Deaf people are directly affected in their ability to personally socialize and continue with daily routines. More specifically, this can constitute their ability to meet new people, connect with friends/family, and to perform in their work or learning environment. It also may result in further mental health changes and an increased reliance on technology. The impact of COVID-19 on the Deaf community in clinical settings must also be considered. This includes changes in policies for in-person interpreters and a rise in telehealth. Often, these effects can be representative of the pre-existing low health literacy, frequency of miscommunication, poor treatment, and the inconvenience felt by Deaf people when trying to access healthcare. Ultimately, these effects on the Deaf community must be taken into account when attempting to create a full picture of the societal shift caused by COVID-19.

Language has a critical role as a social determinant of health and a source of healthcare disparities. Rhetorical devices are ubiquitous in medicine and are often used to persuade or inform care team members. Rhetorical devices help a healthcare team acknowledge and interpret narratives. For example, metaphors are frequently used as rhetorical devices by patients to describe cancer, including winning or losing a battle, surviving a fight, war, potentially implying that the patient feels helpless like a pawn fighting in a struggle directed by the physician, thus reducing patient autonomy and agency. However, this occidental approach is flawed because it excessively focuses on the individual's agency and marginalizes external factors, such as cultural beliefs and social support (Sontag, 1989). Although there is a large body of research about how the rhetoric of medicine affects patients in the United States, there is a lack of such research about how patient experiences' rhetoric can help increase the understanding of Latino populations' unique social determinants. This creative project aims to analyze the rhetorical differences in the description of disease amongst Latino and American communities, translating to creating an educational module for a Spanish for biomedical sciences class. The objective is to increase future healthcare professionals' ability to understand how the composition of descriptions and medical rhetoric in different mediums of humanities can serve as critical tools to analyze social determinants in Latino healthcare delivery.

As much as SARS-CoV-2 has altered the way humans live since the beginning of 2020, this virus's deadly nature has required clinical testing to meet 2020's demands of higher throughput, higher accuracy and higher efficiency. Information technology has allowed institutions, like Arizona State University (ASU), to make strategic and operational changes to combat the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. At ASU, information technology was one of the six facets identified in the ongoing review of the ASU Biodesign Clinical Testing Laboratory (ABCTL) among business, communications, management/training, law, and clinical analysis. The first chapter of this manuscript covers the background of clinical laboratory automation and details the automated laboratory workflow to perform ABCTL’s COVID-19 diagnostic testing. The second chapter discusses the usability and efficiency of key information technology systems of the ABCTL. The third chapter explains the role of quality control and data management within ABCTL’s use of information technology. The fourth chapter highlights the importance of data modeling and 10 best practices when responding to future public health emergencies.

COVID-19 misinformation covers a wide range of topics such as fatality rate, mask effectiveness, potential cures, vaccine development, and the idea of a "plandemic". The spread of this misinformation happens at a rapid speed with the help of social media and powerful influencers, including major political figures. This thesis is a focused case study on hydroxychloroquine, and builds a timeline of the misinformation surrounding the drug. From poorly conducted studies to the use of false experts, this study reveals how politicized misinformation garners more public attention than the actual science.

Though schizophrenia was categorized as a mental illness over 100 years ago, there is a plethora of knowledge that continues to perplex the scientific and medical community alike. This tragic mental disorder affects approximately 1% of the general population, and many of these individuals are homeless if left untreated. Each schizophrenia patient has a different set of symptoms, so all of these patients experience a variety of positive and negative symptoms. Negative symptoms are called so as they are in absence, and some examples include apathy, anhedonia, lack of motivation, reduced social drive, and reduced cognitive functioning. Positive behavior, on the other hand, is a change in behavior or thoughts such as visual or auditory hallucinations, delusions, confused thoughts, disorganized speech, and trouble concentrating. Because schizophrenia patients do not share the exact same set of symptoms, research in schizophrenia requires a tremendous amount of medical resources. Over the last few years, new studies have started in the field of schizophrenia involving proteomics, or the study of proteins and their function. This new frontier gives doctors and scientists alike a new opportunity to improve the quality of life of schizophrenia patients by providing a potential method through which patients would receive individualized treatment based on their specific symptoms.