UC Medical Humanities Consortium

What are the limits of one's duty as a healthcare provider to render care during a peacetime pandemic when that care is often life-saving for the patient yet concurrently life-threatening to the provider? Does it matter if the provider is still in training? How was the COVID-19 pandemic informed by past pandemics, for better or for worse? Voices from the Front Lines: The Pandemic and the Humanities is a time capsule: it seeks to illuminate the behind-the-scenes emotions, reflections, and actions of healthcare workers and medical humanities experts during the tumultuous first few years of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. In this collection, Katherine Ratzan Peeler and Richard M. Ratzan bring together 45 voices in essays, poetry, and photographs from frontline healthcare workers, medical educators, healthcare administrators, journalists, anthropologists, historians, ethicists, and more. The contributors wrestle with questions of triage, conflicting patient and family needs, personal mental and physical health struggles, and bioethical and societal questions about how to live, and assist others, in a world-altering pandemic.