If you're in New Orleans, swing by the Kolaj Institute Gallery for Big Orange Monster: An Emergency Collage Exhibition. The show runs from September 10 through October 18, 2025 and features contributions from 128 artists in 13 countries. Curated by Ric Kasini Kadour, these collages gather witty, scary, uncertain, thoughtful responses to all manner of orange monsters in our midst.

I could not help but think of the FDA's Approved Drug Products with Therapeutic Equivalence Evaluations, known as the Orange Book. This 'book' is itself a good thing, but improper listings by drugmakers contribute to abuse of the patent system and wild-high prices. The team at I-MAK (Initiative for Medicines, Access and Knowledge) has a database and information about the issue, as well as constructive solutions for improving the patent system. My collage entry in the show is called "Devil in the Details." ​

Visit the Kolaj Institute Gallery at 2374 Saint Claude Avenue (Suite 230) in New Orleans.

​
​Bewitched 
by the lemon rind spiraling    
my neighbor’s rocks glass
I think of scurvy.

I toast the trick of citrus
and each sailor 
too late to receive it.
I sip respecting 
that early clinical trial,
Dr. Lind on the high seas
and all who stop misery 
through observation,
all who labor out-of-sight.
 
In class we learn
epi   demos   logos
the study of what befalls
a population, 
a cocktail of Greek words.
We learn that when
public health is working 
we don’t notice it. 

I toast those who do.



"Epidemiology at 5:00pm" is included in The Book of Jobs: Poems About Work. This digital anthology published by the journal One Art on Labor Day, September 1, 2025, is edited by Erin Murphy. Learn more here. The anthology will be re-launched by Penn State University Libraries Open Publishing in 2026. I am pleased that the poem found a place in this collection of truly varied voices and work experiences. "Epidemiology at 5:00pm" recognizes public health researchers, advocates and educators. I'm intending it in the broadest sense, but right now I especially thank CDC employees past and present for their tremendous dedication. 

Novelist John Green has a new collection of essays on tuberculosis that does as good a job at public health truth-telling as anything I’ve read this year. His writing is easy to understand. The truth of TB is not. Everything is Tuberculosis: the History and Persistence of our Deadliest Infection brings us details about the medical and cultural history of TB and its danger. We are now equipped to prevent, detect and treat it. What holds us back? 

In his introduction Green says “This is a book about that cure – why we didn’t find it until the 1950’s, and why in the decades since discovering the cure, we’ve allowed over 15,000,000 humans to die of tuberculosis. I started writing about TB because I wanted to understand how an illness could quietly shape so much of human history. But along the way, I learned that TB is both a form and expression of injustice.” (5)

Yesterday, following the lectionary cycles, many preachers addressed the parable of the Good Samaritan in their sermons. It only appears in the Gospel of Luke (who is, interestingly, the patron saint of physicians and artists). The story is so familiar that it can be hard to hear it with fresh ears. We use it as a reminder to be kind to strangers in need or to scold those we expect to help but do not. The question “Who is my neighbor?” certainly echoes emptily through recent political decisions in the U.S. We don’t know when any of us, individually or in populations, will land shocked and desperate in the ditch. We don’t know when we’ll find ourselves walking past others who are. It happens. I especially like to think about the innkeeper who is entrusted with the care of the man rescued from the ditch as he recovers. He’s paid to do it. This tips his role into that of healthcare and hospitality provider rather than a fellow traveler. Every person in the story matters.       

Green talks about our moment in time as being the middle of the tuberculosis story. Not the end. The parable of the Good Samaritan can be viewed this way, too. It is more than a tidy, contained example. What happens now?
​​

Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green is available from Crash Course Books (2025).

Each month for the 2024-25 academic year a piece of artwork or a poem on the topic of access to medicines has been displayed in the West Virginia University Health Sciences Library alongside a comment. For May, "Wolves in Sheep's Clothing IV" was accompanied by a response by Lemley Mullett, Digital Collections Assistant, West Virginia and Regional History Center. 

​A current Wolf in Sheep's Clothing is the ORPHAN Cures Act (H.R. 946). It presents itself as protecting research innovation. Actually, it is a crafty way for pharmaceutical companies to avoid price negotiations. Learn more from this Patients for Affordable Drugs update and fact sheet.

There are more Abraham Lincoln images in Gettysburg than you can shake a stick at. This statue on Baltimore Street by the Adams County Public Library rises above the text of the Gettysburg Address. While I’m not so keen on the overly oratorial pose sculptor Stanley J. Watts placed him in with the outstretched arm, there is something about the rest of his figure that feels right to me. The location feels right, too. The library is a place of welcome for all, a place of information, questions and stories. At a local People’s Town Hall event on May 3, both PA Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta and U.S. Rep. Madeleine Dean mentioned the Gettysburg Address in their remarks. They are each enamored by the writing and the evergreen truth of it.

Zoom in to the corner of the sheet Lincoln holds. The sticker is for Tradeoffs. 

Tradeoffs covers health policy news in a way that is accessible and sharp. I cannot put words into Lincoln’s mouth, but I think he would have liked this nonprofit organization and its podcast episodes. Lincoln had the maturity to let his views evolve. He was a policy wonk. Lincoln paid attention to the lived reality of others. He personally suffered serious injuries and infectious disease (including two rounds of malaria). Public health was no abstraction. He labored to communicate so that the result was effortless. I removed the sticker with the Tradeoffs logo. The moment was one of solidarity. This drive for the wellbeing of an entire population does not change through time.

The April piece featured in the West Virginia University Health Sciences Library exhibit Prescriptions for Change: Value Voting in Healthcare is "Skyrocket is a Verb" with a response from Terra Rogerson. Visit the exhibit case in Circulation on the second floor. April 7-13 was National Public Health Week. 

The March piece for the West Virginia University Health Sciences Library exhibit Prescriptions for Change: Value Voting in Healthcare is "Formulary Paperchain."

"We live in the upside-down" Jon Stewart exclaimed in the February 24, 2025 Episode from Season 30 of The Daily Show. A smashed coffee mug punctuated his exasperation at government subsidies for the pharmaceutical industry which, in turn, charges Americans as much as it pleases. We are so used to it, he reminds us, that we've become numb.  

We can do better. 

In February, "Patent Thickets Begin" was on display in the West Virginia University Health Sciences Library in Morgantown. The exhibit Prescriptions for Change: Value Voting in Healthcare rotates one work per month along with a response from a member of the community during the 2024-25 academic year. Here's an abstract for a New England Journal of Medicine article by WVU College of Law Professor S. Sean Tu. Co-authored with Bernard Chao, University of Denver Sturm College of Law; Ryan Whalen, University of Hong Kong; and Aaron S. Kesselheim, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, it includes a link to the full article, "Clearing Dense Drug-Patent Thickets."