Anna DeForest’s first novel, A History of Present Illness (2022), follows an unnamed medical student through tension-filled classroom and clinical years among more privileged classmates in New York City. DeForest’s follow-up novel seems a segue from the first. Our Long Marvelous Dying (2024) also features an unnamed narrator–one further along in their medical career– seeking…
Tag: COVID-19 pandemic
It Takes a Village to Heal the Doctor: How the Humanities Helped Me Reclaim Idealism in Practicing Medicine
On the phone with a close friend I vented about a homeless patient of mine who had a stigmatizing health history and whose documentation overflowed with pejorative language; scanning through the notes as I prepared for my palliative care consultation, I counted “noncompliant” six times in just one paragraph from one specialist. The term “noncompliant,”…
Mapping fever: disease archives in Ling Ma’s Severance and my class’s Google Earth project
Mapping Fever: Disease Archives in Ling Ma’s Severance and My Class’s Google Earth Project “The city was operating on a different kind of time,” observes Candace Chen, the protagonist of Ling Ma’s alarmingly prescient 2018 pandemic novel, Severance (248). During the devastating global spread of the fictional Shen Fever, Candace—immune to the disease—begins to take…
Review: Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, by Ruha Benjamin
Ruha Benjamin’s Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, offers an expansive, interdisciplinary, and accessible vision of not just the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the untenability of our current systems, but also the ways we might—through small, day-to-day interactions just as much as sweeping, systemic change—seed and proliferate justice that…
Is Zoom the sole source of fatigue?
Amala Poli // We have all heard about Zoom fatigue; most of us are perhaps experiencing it on an everyday basis. The literature on combating Zoom fatigue continues to abound, with new perspectives and ideas in each article. [1] [2] However, what can we think of the potent combination of research and academic work…
The Virus, the Market, and the Body
Bojan Srbinovski // What has the COVID-19 pandemic taught the medical humanities about the body? On Monday, November 9, the American pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced the encouraging preliminary findings of a COVID-19 vaccine study that suggested an efficacy of more than 90 percent. This welcome news came as a bright spot against the background of…
From Rumi to Herman Hesse, A Contemplation on Optimism: Why Uncertainty is When Hope is Needed Most
Nitya Rajeshuni // I was followed only by the clouds, drifting across glass windowpanes, as I passed my regular landmarks—the coffee shop with live music, the endless roadblocks of construction, the redbrick campus then pink with cherry blossoms. While life is now beginning anew, there were many months in the dark slumber of the pandemic…
“Novum Corpus, Pristina Mens”: Pandemic Forms of Weight Loss, or an Apology in Seven Cantos
Pasquale S. Toscano // Dat sparso capiti vivacis cornus cervi, Dat spatium collo summasque cacuminat aures Cum pedibusque manus, cum longis bracchia mutat Cruribus et velat maculoso vellere corpus; Additus et pavor est. … … ut vero vultus et cornua vidit in unda, ‘me miserum!’ dicturus erat: vox nulla secuta est; Ingemuit: vox illa fuit,…
The New Normal: Dating During COVID-19
Dr. Brian J. Troth // The trouble with normal is that so very few people are. I’m referencing Michael Warner’s The Trouble With Normal, in which the author shows that our notion of ‘normal’ is the result of society accumulating data. Once we knew how many people fit into a category, the majority category became…
Pedagogy of the Pandemic: Narrative Medicine and Radical Empathy
Sayantani DasGupta, Author // Ibraim Nascimento, Painter // There is a rupture in higher education and in that rupture is an opportunity. As novelist Arundhati Roy (2020) has written, “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway…