Author Series: Voices from the Front Lines: The Pandemic and the Humanities
Thursday, May 08, 2025, 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm
Countway Library 695 Huntington Ave.
Boston
Please join Countway Library and the HMS Center for Bioethics for an author talk with Katherine R. Peeler and Richard M. Ratzan about their book, Voices from the Front Lines: The Pandemic and the Humanities!
Books will be sold (by Porter Square Books) and signed at event!
About the Book
What are the limits of one's duty as a healthcare provider to render care during a peacetime pandemic when that care is often life-saving for the patient yet concurrently life-threatening to the provider? Does it matter if the provider is still in training? How was the COVID-19 pandemic informed by past pandemics, for better or for worse? Voices from the Front Lines: The Pandemic and the Humanities is a time capsule: it seeks to illuminate the behind-the-scenes emotions, reflections, and actions of healthcare workers and medical humanities experts during the tumultuous first few years of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. In this collection, Katherine Ratzan Peeler and Richard M. Ratzan bring together 45 voices in essays, poetry, and photographs from frontline healthcare workers, medical educators, healthcare administrators, journalists, anthropologists, historians, ethicists, and more. In their talk, occurring at the 5-year anniversary of the beginning of the pandemic, Peeler and Ratzan will reflect on how contributors wrestled with questions of triage, conflicting patient and family needs, personal mental and physical health struggles, and bioethical and societal questions about how to live, and assist others, in a world-altering pandemic.
About the Authors
Dr. Katherine Ratzan Peeler is a pediatric critical care physician at Boston Children's Hospital and an national expert on the health and health rights of detained immigrant children and adults. From a bioethics perspective, she is interested in the concept of divergent directives/dual loyalties and how care providers navigate opposing mandates within a care system.
Dr. Richard M. Ratzan is a retired internist and emergency medicine physician with a long-standing interest in the medical humanities, especially medical ethics, literature and medicine, and the history of medicine. Dr. Ratzan is the author and editor of numerous articles and books, including Imaging Vesalius: An Ekphrastic, Scholarly, and Literary Celebration of the 1543 De Humani Corporis Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius.
Books will be sold (by Porter Square Books) and signed at event!
About the Book
What are the limits of one's duty as a healthcare provider to render care during a peacetime pandemic when that care is often life-saving for the patient yet concurrently life-threatening to the provider? Does it matter if the provider is still in training? How was the COVID-19 pandemic informed by past pandemics, for better or for worse? Voices from the Front Lines: The Pandemic and the Humanities is a time capsule: it seeks to illuminate the behind-the-scenes emotions, reflections, and actions of healthcare workers and medical humanities experts during the tumultuous first few years of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. In this collection, Katherine Ratzan Peeler and Richard M. Ratzan bring together 45 voices in essays, poetry, and photographs from frontline healthcare workers, medical educators, healthcare administrators, journalists, anthropologists, historians, ethicists, and more. In their talk, occurring at the 5-year anniversary of the beginning of the pandemic, Peeler and Ratzan will reflect on how contributors wrestled with questions of triage, conflicting patient and family needs, personal mental and physical health struggles, and bioethical and societal questions about how to live, and assist others, in a world-altering pandemic.
About the Authors
Dr. Katherine Ratzan Peeler is a pediatric critical care physician at Boston Children's Hospital and an national expert on the health and health rights of detained immigrant children and adults. From a bioethics perspective, she is interested in the concept of divergent directives/dual loyalties and how care providers navigate opposing mandates within a care system.
Dr. Richard M. Ratzan is a retired internist and emergency medicine physician with a long-standing interest in the medical humanities, especially medical ethics, literature and medicine, and the history of medicine. Dr. Ratzan is the author and editor of numerous articles and books, including Imaging Vesalius: An Ekphrastic, Scholarly, and Literary Celebration of the 1543 De Humani Corporis Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius.
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