Reflecting Together in a Time of Urgency

An Invitation from the Executive Committee

Urgency changes our relationship to time. It can compel people, like health care workers on the frontlines of this pandemic, to accelerate their activities to meet the demand of people in need, or some policy makers to move swiftly to mitigate the shock of economic catastrophe. But urgency also invites deliberation and pause, a slow temporality of thought, so that reflections on a crisis take in as comprehensive an understanding of a phenomenon as possible. Not all the data is in, and data can’t be rushed.

As we enter the third month of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, states and localities ponder a society and economy emerging from voluntary cloisters to reengage even as the virus lurks. It is appropriate at this time to call upon the medical and health humanities community to begin to ponder together what we have gone through and are still going through. This pandemic has revealed much about what and how we value some basic assumptions of American life—health care, economic prosperity and precarity, racial disparity, the biopolitics and bioethics of who lives or dies. In this ongoing moment of urgency, it is time to reflect together.

We are grateful to the editors of the online medical humanities journal Synapsis to help us begin this reflection. Dr. Rishi Goyal and Arden Hegele have edited a special issue on COVID-19, which we make available to read with us. Dr. Goyal has written a provocative, insightful introduction that we believe is worth reading in its entirety, and Goyal and Hegele have curated an impressive collection of pieces that range across scale and scope that help us think together about just what has gone so very wrong to get us to this place in 2020. But as Goyal and Hegele argue, “It’s with this spirit of critique and consensus that we have put together our special issue of Synapsis. The medical and health humanities, with their focus on historical analysis, social comparison and narrative engagement—coupled with a consensus-based scientific approach that supports global equity and justice—can ameliorate our failures.”

Read with us, and then give us your own reflections by filling out this Google Form. We want to learn from you what you have learned, so that through our collective data and by giving ourselves plenty of time to ponder, we may all get smarter, together.