The Health Humanities and Camus’s The Plague

Using Camus’s classic novel as a touchstone for health humanities education

Camus’s The Plague, first published in 1947, is widely regarded as a classic of 20th-century fiction and as an interesting point of reference for the field of health humanities. Woods Nash’s edited collection of essays by diverse hands explores how The Plague illuminates important themes, ideas, dilemmas, and roles in modern healthcare, helping readers—and particularly medical students and professionals—understand issues related to their training and practice in a dramatic and stimulating context.

The essays here represent various disciplinary and personal perspectives. Nash’s compilation is intended as a companion text for undergraduate and graduate courses such as Narrative Medicine, Human Suffering, and Pathographies of Epidemics, as well as traditional courses like the History of Medicine, Bioethics, Medical Ethics, and Literature and Medicine, which are offered increasingly in schools of medicine, public health, nursing, and dentistry.

A wide-ranging collection, this book will be useful for students and scholars in literature, philosophy, and cultural studies, as well as to all those in the healthcare field.