key: cord-0772381-l8ckeh3v
authors: Wilson, Steven
title: The Health Humanities and Camus’s the Plague, Edited by Woods Nash, Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2019
date: 2020-10-09
journal: J Med Humanit
DOI: 10.1007/s10912-020-09668-w
sha: a9daa54c02a2bc5a7c9456ac586c696623fdedd1
doc_id: 772381
cord_uid: l8ckeh3v

nan

the French Resistance, and his familiarity with physicians. The essays in this section provide a solid foundation for more textual readings of the stigma of disease, suffering, vulnerability, healing, care, and physician identity in part two, which culminates fittingly in Orme's exhortation that The Plague "provides a number of templates for patients and clinicians dealing with the daily reality of illness and disease" (84). The third section segues neatly into the various displacements provoked by the literary text, be it in the reader who identifies with the exiled citizens of Oran or the multimedia echoes of the tropes of Camus's work in film (specifically, the 1995 movie Outbreak) and video game (the 2012 production of Plague, Inc.). Building on this, the fourth section opens with two chapters that consider, respectively, how the representations of disease and its effects in The Plague resonate with the realities of Ebola in West Africa, and with the suffering of a husband and wife as the latter undergoes multiple sclerosis in what is a particularly poignant and beautifully written essay. In the aftermath of reading about so many challenges posed by disease, the concluding piece offers some encouragement by picking up on one of the watchwords of our time, resilience, but sending the reader away on the hopeful note that far from being an "individualistic" pursuit, the paradigm of resilience portrayed in The Plague is a collective, social one from which we can all draw strength when confronted with adversity. The links between chapters that are accentuated by the volume's considered running order are further enhanced by two dexterous editorial judgements: essays occasionally make explicit reference to each other, suggesting contributors have read each others' work, and Nash provides a helpful summary at the beginning of each piece. These decisions allow for cohesion and concentration. This is a compelling yet accessible study, which will be of interest to a multiplicity of readersstudents of literature and/or medicine, healthcare professionals, and those drawn to philosophies of health and disease studies, for a start. In his introduction to the book, Nash writes: "More than seven decades after its publication, The Plague remains profoundly relevant to healthcare education and practice" (10). He cannot have known just how "relevant" it was to become to all of us seeking to better understand the realities of a deadly disease only a few months after his book went to press. As Stephen Metcalf put it in the Los Angeles Times (March 23, 2020), the "relevance" of The Plague "lashes you across the face" in these days of Covid-19. More prosaically, what we can say is that this archetype of "pestilence literature" has found millions of new readers across the world against the backdrop of infection, confinement and insecurity brought about by the current pandemic. The particular timeliness of Nash's book, while unforeseen, is inescapable. Yet, in its exploration of the human response to an epidemic, it sensitively redirects attention back to the transcending values and behaviors that lie at the heart of Camus's novel: vulnerability, empathy, solidarity, and resistance. This reader, for one, is glad that Nash's book was published when it was, for it provides a refreshing reminder that The Plague is so much more than "the Covid novel."

Albert Camus' The Plague and our own Great Reset