This is the story of the birth, growth and marginalisation of a key discipline in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic.
On 6th December 1917 a munitions ship exploded in Halifax sound, Nova Scotia. The blast devastated the surrounding area, killed 1,950 people and injured 9,000. This was the 'big bang' of disaster studies. A talented Anglican curate, Samuel Henry Prince, set about recording the social effects of the catastrophe and the progress of the relief effort. It was not quite his first disaster, as five years previously he had conducted funerals for some of the victims of the Titanic. At Columbia University, Prince wrote his PhD thesis on the Halifax disaster and in 1920 he published it as a book. This was the first modern, systematic, analytical account of the social effects of catastrophe. Other authors quickly followed Prince's lead. Thus we have 100 years of study in the field of disasters.
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