In what we’ve come to call COVID Times, one role that has elicited particular frustration is that of the sidelined medical student. When COVID-19 gained full sway over New York City, students at Columbia’s medical school lost their clinical electives as a measure intended to keep them and their patients safe. How were they to find purpose in a pandemic in which they were unable to make a clinical contribution?
Enter the gift of narrative distance. If students couldn’t be in the wards, they might find value in encountering the pandemic at a remove. So it was that in mid-March, I found myself designing a new Narrative Medicine class, “Epidemic Fictions,” that I would teach to medical students in April, May and June through the domesticated grid that is Zoom. Together, my students and I asked: How do the characteristic tools of the humanities—historical reflection, critical inquiry and attention to feeling and justice—help us make sense of what we’re experiencing? And what could encountering epidemic (and its global correlate, pandemic) in fiction afford us?
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