This book contains several critical essays, book reviews, and poems that address the current pandemic to mark a sad but hopeful first anniversary of COVID. Similar to many academic journals, the Journal of Medical Humanities, in which these contributions were first published, has received a number of submissions during the first year of the pandemic relating directly to it. In the early months, the journal saw an unprecedented number of poetry submissions from physicians who seemed to be turning to verse as a way to memorialize what was happening, to find ways of healing from the devastating number of dying patients, and to capture the exhaustion and anxiety of caring for others day after day without respite. By publishing this selection, the volume editors honor and thank all those who have been caring for patients, teaching and mentoring students, and as such have been contributing to our understanding and awareness of this crisis. Previously published in Journal of Medical Humanities, Volume 42, issue 1, March 2021 Chapters "COVID-19, Contagion, and Vaccine Optimism", "Virile Infertile Men, and Other Representations of In/Fertile Hegemonic Masculinity in Fiction Television Series", "Movement as Method: Some Existential and Epistemological Reflections on Dance in the Health Humanities" and "The Ethic of Responsibility: Max Weber's Verstehen and Shared Decision-Making in Patient-Centred Care" are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book covers a brief history of the Health Humanities Consortium and contains a toolkit for those academic leaders determined to launch inter- and multi-disciplinary health humanities programs in their own colleges and universities. It offers remarkable discussions and descriptions of pedagogical practices from undergraduate programs through medical education and resident training; philosophical and political analyses of structural injustices and clinical biases; and insightful and informative analyses of imaginative work such as comics, literary texts, and paintings. Previously published in Journal of Medical Humanities Volume 42, issue 4, December 2021 Chapters "Reflective Writing about Near-Peer Blogs: A Novel Method for Introducing the Medical Humanities in Premedical Education", "Medical Students' Creation of Original Poetry, Comics, and Masks to Explore Professional Identity Formation", "Reconsidering Empathy: An Interpersonal Approach and Participatory Arts in the Medical Humanities" and "The Health Benefits of Autobiographical Writing: An Interdisciplinary Perspective" are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

The Routledge Handbook of Health and Media provides an extensive review and exploration of the myriad ways that health and media function as a symbiotic partnership that profoundly influences contemporary societies. A unique and significant volume in an expanding pedagogical field, this diverse collection of international, original, and interdisciplinary essays goes beyond issues of representation to engage in scholarly conversations about the web of networks that inextricably bind media and health to each other. Divided into sections on film, television, animation, photography, comics, advertising, social media, and print journalism, each chapter begins with a concrete text or texts, using it to raise more general and more theoretical issues about the medium in question. As such, this Handbook defines, expands, and illuminates the role that the humanities and arts play in the education and practice of healthcare professionals and in our understanding of health, illness, and disability. The Routledge Handbook of Health and Media is an invaluable reference for academics, students and health professionals engaged with cultural issues in media and medicine, popular representations of disease and disability, and the patient/professional health care encounter.

Over the past forty years, the health humanities, previously called the medical humanities, has emerged as one of the most exciting fields for interdisciplinary scholarship, advancing humanistic inquiry into bioethics, human rights, health care, and the uses of technology. It has also helped inspire medical practitioners to engage in deeper reflection about the human elements of their practice.
In "Health Humanities Reader," editors Tess Jones, Delese Wear, and Lester D. Friedman have assembled fifty-four leading scholars, educators, artists, and clinicians to survey the rich body of work that has already emerged from the field--and to imagine fresh approaches to the health humanities in these original essays. The collection's contributors reflect the extraordinary diversity of the field, including scholars from the disciplines of disability studies, history, literature, nursing, religion, narrative medicine, philosophy, bioethics, medicine, and the social sciences.
With warmth and humor, critical acumen and ethical insight, "Health Humanities Reader" truly humanizes the field of medicine. Its accessible language and broad scope offers something for everyone from the experienced medical professional to a reader interested in health and illness.