“As COVID-19 reminds us anew, people living in a crisis rarely understand their experience teleologically. And, given that suffering is central not only to medicine but to human experience, there are also broader historiographical lessons to be gained.”
Sari Altschuler, Associate Professor of English and Associate Director of the Humanities Center, has contributed an essay to a forum on COVID-19 and the history of medicine. The piece, entitled, “Learning from Crisis: Narrative and the History of Medicine,” considers COVID-19 as a crisis of knowledge making, and urges readers to rethink the ways we narrate medical history.
