医学人文学科首先倾向于与艺术和人文学科帮助我们了解健康的方式相关联。然而,这不是我们领域的唯一或必然的主要目标。COVID-19大流行首先揭示的是关键医学人文领域所坚持的:社会的深层纠缠,文化,生物医学的历史生活。大流行是恢复特定类型专业知识力量的时候,专注于流行病学,潜在结果和疫苗开发的科学建模。所有这些都是科学快速传递的。对于医学人文研究人员来说,在这些辩论中找到购买来自我们更沉思的见解一直具有挑战性,“缓慢的研究”方法。然而,随着危机的高度过去,我们的领域现在可能正在进入自己的领域。大流行,以及提高科学专业知识,也清楚地表明了文化的含义:它不是一个静态的实体,而是通过互动和关系产生和发展。从长远来看,我们可以看到某种“COVID-19文化”的出现,其特征是专业知识之间的纠缠,社交媒体,经济,教育进步,对卫生服务和人民的社会经济风险,政治种族和宗教/精神背景。医学人文学科的作用是关注这些相互作用,并研究它们在人类经验和大流行的潜在影响中的作用。然而,为了在医疗保健研究领域中生存和成长,我们需要参与,而不仅仅是评论。医学人文学者需要坚持我们在跨学科研究中的专业知识,根据经验与专家充分合作,并积极与资助者合作,展示我们的价值。
Medical humanities has tended first and foremost to be associated with the ways in which the arts and humanities help us to understand health. However, this is not the only or necessarily the primary aim of our field. What the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed above all is what the field of critical medical humanities has insisted on: the deep entanglement of social, cultural, historical life with the biomedical. The pandemic has been a time for reinstating the power of expertise of a particular kind, focusing on epidemiology, scientific modelling of potential outcomes and vaccine development. All of this delivered by science at speed.It has been challenging for medical humanities researchers to find purchase in these debates with insights from our more contemplative, \'slow research\' approaches. However, as the height of the crisis passes, our field might now be coming into its own. The pandemic, as well as being productive of scientific expertise, also demonstrated clearly the meaning of culture: that it is not a static entity, but is produced and evolves through interaction and relationship. Taking a longer view, we can see the emergence of a certain \'COVID-19 culture\' characterised by entanglements between expert knowledge, social media, the economy, educational progress, risk to health services and people in their socio-economic, political ethnic and religious/spiritual contexts. It is the role of medical humanities to pay attention to those interactions and to examine how they play out in the human experience and potential impact of the pandemic. However, to survive and grow in significance within the field of healthcare research, we need to engage not just to comment. There is a need for medical humanities scholars to assert our expertise in interdisciplinary research, fully engaged with experts by experience, and to work proactively with funders to demonstrate our value.