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33 HEC F. 1 (2021)

handle is hein.journals/hecforum33 and id is 1 raw text is: HEC Forum (2021) 33:1-6
https://doi.org/1 0.1007/si 0730-021-09448-6
A Journal of the COVID-19 (Plague) Year
Brian H. Childs' Laura Vearrier2
Accepted: 19 February 2021 / Published online: 23 March 2021
©The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021
Abstract
The essays in this special issue of HEC Forum provide reflections that make explicit
the implicit anthropology that our current pandemic has brought but which in the
medical ethics literature around COVID-19 has to a great extent ignored. Three of
the essays are clearly journalistic as a literary genre: one by a hospital chaplain,
one by a medical student in her pre-clinical years, and one by a fourth-year medical
student who reports her experience as she completed her undergraduate clerkships
and applied for positions in graduate medical education. Other essays explore the
pandemic from historical, sociological, and economic perspectives, particularly how
triage policies have been found to be largely blind to structural healthcare dispari-
ties, while simultaneously unable to appropriately address those disparities. Central
issues that need to be addressed in triage are not just whether a utilitarian response
is the most just response, but what exactly is the greatest good for the greatest num-
ber? Together, the essays in this special issue of HEC Forum create a call for a
more anthropological approach to understanding health and healthcare. The narrow
approach of viewing health as resulting primarily from healthcare will continue to
hinder advances and perpetuate disparities. Health outcomes result from a complex
interaction of various social, economic, cultural, historical, and political factors.
Advancing healthcare requires contextualizing the health of populations amongst
these factors. The COVID-19 pandemic has made us keenly aware of how interde-
pendent our health as a society can be.
In the March 28, 2020 Book Section of the Guardian an interview with Cath-
erine Camus, the daughter of Albert Camus, indicated that orders for his
E Brian H. Childs
childsbh@mercer.edu
Laura Vearrier
lvearrier@umc.edu
Professor of Bioethics and Professionalism, Mercer University School of Medicine, Savannah,
GA, USA
2  Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine, University of Mississippi Medical Center, Jackson,
USA

I_) Springer

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