Böcker utgivna av University of California Health Humanities Press

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.

Treating patients more humanely starts with promoting cultural competence and cultural humility. These concepts are critical to enhancing the medical experience for underserved communities and rebuilding their trust (confianza) in clinicians and the healthcare system. Given vast health-related disparities and their increase due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for innovative approaches to medical humanities is urgent. This collection brings together essays from both scholars and health practitioners that adopt either a cultural humility approach or a focus on social justice to shed new light on inequities. As the chapters in this volume illustrate, the medical humanities have a role in bringing down the barriers that prevent marginalized groups from having equitable access to health care. The essays address topics ranging from autism and aphasia to endometriosis, COVID-19, and Ebola with regions spanning the U.S., Latin America, and Africa.

Operated on as an infant, without anesthesia, Wendy P. Williams began life at war with her body. "There were tubes everywhere, in and out of every opening," her mother reminded her on every anniversary of her surgery. Autobiography of a Sea Creature takes readers on Williams' difficult sensory journey toward healing, as she communes along the way with horseshoe crabs, dolphins, and other marine life that taught her the restorative power of beauty, resilience, and interdependence. At times luscious and lyrical, at other times analytical and reflective, this literary memoir portrays the dissociative experience of trauma and the roots of self-destructive cycles, as well as the tragic results of medical beliefs at the time that infants could not feel pain. Autobiography of a Sea Creature is both a love letter to the earth and a hopeful testament of humans' capacity to heal our deepest wounds.