![]() ![]() It is, bar none, the best study of an epidemic or pandemic as a social phenomenon that I have ever read. None of these literary works, as brilliant as they are, hold a candle to Albert Camus’s “The Plague,” a remarkable novel I routinely assign to my students. ![]() As coincidence would have it, we were knee-deep in the section on epidemics, and making our way through such classics as Henrik Ibsen’s compelling drama of a public health crisis in a small Norwegian town, “An Enemy of the People,” Katherine Anne Porter’s influenza tale “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” Larry Kramer’s document of the early years of the AIDS pandemic, “The Normal Heart,” and Sinclair Lewis’s Pulitzer Prize novel of medical research and infectious disease, “Arrowsmith.” Gretchen Whitmer, D-Mich., declared an emergency in my home state, and my university’s president ordered an unprecedented shutdown of the entire academic enterprise, I was teaching my undergraduate course on literature and medicine. ![]()
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