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33 HEC F. 1 (2021)

handle is hein.journals/hecforum33 and id is 1 raw text is: HEC Forum (2021) 33:1-6 https://doi.org/1 0.1007/si 0730-021-09448-6 A Journal of the COVID-19 (Plague) Year Brian H. Childs' Laura Vearrier2 Accepted: 19 February 2021 / Published online: 23 March 2021 ŠThe Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021 Abstract The essays in this special issue of HEC Forum provide reflections that make explicit the implicit anthropology that our current pandemic has brought but which in the medical ethics literature around COVID-19 has to a great extent ignored. Three of the essays are clearly journalistic as a literary genre: one by a hospital chaplain, one by a medical student in her pre-clinical years, and one by a fourth-year medical student who reports her experience as she completed her undergraduate clerkships and applied for positions in graduate medical education. Other essays explore the pandemic from historical, sociological, and economic perspectives, particularly how triage policies have been found to be largely blind to structural healthcare dispari- ties, while simultaneously unable to appropriately address those disparities. Central issues that need to be addressed in triage are not just whether a utilitarian response is the most just response, but what exactly is the greatest good for the greatest num- ber? Together, the essays in this special issue of HEC Forum create a call for a more anthropological approach to understanding health and healthcare. The narrow approach of viewing health as resulting primarily from healthcare will continue to hinder advances and perpetuate disparities. Health outcomes result from a complex interaction of various social, economic, cultural, historical, and political factors. Advancing healthcare requires contextualizing the health of populations amongst these factors. The COVID-19 pandemic has made us keenly aware of how interde- pendent our health as a society can be. In the March 28, 2020 Book Section of the Guardian an interview with Cath- erine Camus, the daughter of Albert Camus, indicated that orders for his E Brian H. Childs childsbh@mercer.edu Laura Vearrier lvearrier@umc.edu Professor of Bioethics and Professionalism, Mercer University School of Medicine, Savannah, GA, USA 2 Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine, University of Mississippi Medical Center, Jackson, USA I_) Springer