Professor Laura Guertin and Penn State Brandywine honors students took a trip in April to Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia to discover truths about illnesses during the Civil War era.
A photograph from the excursion the class uploaded onto Flicker was included in the twelfth edition of the Schmap Philadelphia Guide, http://www.schmap.com/. Schmap is an online publisher of digital travel guides. The field trip was inspired by the honors students' upcoming fall semester theme: pandemics and epidemics. The class had a picnic among the tombstones and then strolled through the cemetery and the historic Mutter Museum during a guided tour where they learned about diseases that once plagued Philadelphia. The trip was a transition into the students' reading of Bring Out Your Dead: the great plague of yellow fever in Philadelphia in 1793 in the fall.
Picnicking among the tombstones
Outside of the Mutter Museum from left to right: Jackie Glace, Lauren Orner, Ben Bean, Megan Henderson, Chelsea Gilliam, and Chris Brown