The Covid-19 pandemic has presented the world with unprecedented challenges. The effects on society have been comprehensive and affected every walk of life. In Pandemic Heroes and Heroines, Marguerite Bouvard offers the first book-length study of the pandemic's impact on one of the most vulnerable groups, front line medical workers charged with caring for the sick and providing general health and welfare.

Including poems by writers from the dawn of the Early Modern period to the 21st Century, this anthology explores changing attitudes to medicine, health and the body. A Body of Work: An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine is divided into nine thematic sections, including poetry from all periods as well as historical documents that help students place the poetry in its cultural contexts and covering such topics as: -The material body -Nerves, nervous disorders and psychology -Consumption: food, drugs and alcohol -Contagion and disease -Doctors, hospitals and the experience of medicine -Treatments and cures -The body in pleasure and pain -Evolution, genetics and reproduction -Ageing, dying and death "A Body of Work "is supported by a companion website offering further contextual essays, class discussion questions and visual material.Includes work by such poets as: Daniel Abse, Maya Angelou, Matthew Arnold, W.H. Auden, Ann Bradstreet, William Blake, Charles Bukowski, Raymond Carver, S.T Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Robert Lowell, Paul Muldoon, Sylvia Plath, Rainer Maria Rilke, Theodore Roetke, Christina Rossetti, Jo Shapcott, Jonathan Swift, Michael Symmons-Roberts, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, William Wordsworth.