Covid-19 altered the way that we view the future, particularly concerning the future of healthcare and dealing with a global pandemic.
COVID-19's facets can be subdivided into its initial stages, human transmission, and ongoing experiences. Alongside COVID-19’s transitory stages, the themes—life and death, community and isolation, health and illness, suddenness, and preparedness—dominate COVID-19 and pandemic literature.
The research examines doctors’ autobiographical novels, biographical nursing memoirs, fiction novels, and illness narratives to answer the question of how the pandemic was managed by NHS health professionals and the significance of documenting Wave 1 and Wave 2, the initial pandemic phases.
Grounded in scholarly discourse focused on medical humanities and literary criticism, the paper also examines directives for handling pandemics in the future.
I employ mixed method approaches, including data analysis techniques from Coding Streams of Language (Geisler and Swarts, 2019), corpus analysis techniques utilising Voyant Tools, an open-source, web-based application for performing textual analysis, and close reading techniques interpolated by patient-narrative expert Rita Charon. I examined patients' illness narratives to comprehend their COVID-19 experiences using two credible public-facing databases—the COVID-19 Recovery Collective, a web-based collection of 72 textual accounts, and Patient Voices, a first-person patient narrative collection.
Different patient populations respond differently to COVID-19, particularly those who reside in nursing homes. This raises questions about the social ethics, power structures, and vulnerability in care communities.
Finally, the research implicates that literary, medical and digital humanities methodologies are effective for narrating the story of COVID-19 and addressing future global crises.

Authors:
Esther Kentish, University of Leicester, United Kingdom

About the Presenter(s)
Ms Esther Kentish is a University Doctoral Student at University of Leicester in United Kingdom

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