The centrality of narrative and language in the pursuit of medicine and healing is a theme in my Literature and Medicine seminar. When stories about the novel coronavirus emerged, I adjusted writing assignments so that students could engage with these emergent narratives.
What role is played by scientific/medical authority—and other kinds of competing authority—in disseminating scientific knowledge during such a time? What kinds of physicians’ narratives and patients’ stories were most powerful at a time when knowing how the virus is spread and affects the body—both the patient’s body and the social body—is literally a matter of life and death?
The students approached these questions in a variety of ways employing strands of the themes and issues discussed in the seminar. Some chose to write about the course texts themselves; others about new sources and mediums of information. —Uma Satyavolu Rau