Hartford House Hosts Conversation about Mark Twain and Epidemics

Posted on by Joe Lemak

Throughout Samuel Clemens’s – Mark Twain’s — lifetime, which stretched from 1835 to 1910, epidemics were a part of family life in all the locales where he settled and traveled: Missouri, the West, Europe, the Middle East, and Hartford, Connecticut.

Twain had intimate experiences with the epidemics that, long before vaccines and antibiotics existed, plagued his world. From his childhood bout with measles in Hannibal, which he says started him on his literary career; through the cholera epidemic quarantine that he defied to visit the Parthenon in Greece; through the fears of miasmic sewer gas that led him to redo the plumbing in his Hartford home, his life was led in the shadow of unrestricted infection.

No one is better equipped to discuss this topic, along with the many other medical aspects of the Clemens family’s life, than K. Patrick Ober, M.D., the author of Mark Twain and Medicine: “Any Mummery Will Cure.” Ober is Professor of Internal Medicine (Endocrinology and Metabolism) at the Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston- Salem, North Carolina. He is interested in the relationship between the humanities and the practice of medicine, and he has written about the dehumanizing properties of the electronic medical record. He is an internationally recognized Mark Twain scholar, and along with Mark Twain and Medicine has published many other commentaries on Twain and medicine. Ober has been recognized as one of the “Best Doctors in America” on repeated occasions. He was nominated for the 2007 Humanism in Medicine Award of the Association of American Medical Colleges.

He will be the fifth interviewee in Trouble at Home, the online series that, for the moment, is taking on the role of the museum’s beloved 10-year-old series The Trouble Begins at 5:30. Dr. Ober will be interviewed by Mark Twain House historian and founder of the Trouble Begins series Steve Courtney. This program takes place on July 9 at 5:30pm EST. It is free to attend, though while registering for the event, the Hartford House hopes you’ll consider contributing what you’d call a fair ticket price.

Click here for registration information.

All previous 2020 Trouble at Home conversations can be found in the CMTS Trouble Begins Archive.