Covid & the humanities

What could humanities scholars have to say about Covid? Here Caitjan Gainty, a historian of medicine and healthcare at King’s College London, discusses the Covid response with her colleague Daniel Hadas, a lecturer in Latin and Ancient Greek.

In the Covid response, governments and public health authorities opted to side-line the knowledge and discourse of the humanities, in a singled-minded focus on “following the science”. This project of setting aside the humanities was both an illusion and a mistake. An illusion, because science itself is a human activity, and the philosophical and political constraints within which it always operates must be acknowledged. A mistake, because the question of what to do in times of pandemic is not just medical or scientific, but raises that fundamental concern of the humanities, and of all human kind: how we can best live and die.

Accordingly, this conversation considers how a philosophical and spiritual analysis can both help us understand more clearly the forms taken by the Covid response, and point to how a better response, one more in accord with the fullness of human dignity, could be possible in future health crises.