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Editor’s Note
Dear Readers, Being a part of the Editorial Staff of The Health Humanities Journal is a fasttrack to getting thrown headlong into discussions of narrative medicine, poetic structure’s relation to message, and more perspectives on hospitals than we sometimes know what to do with. As with past semesters, I have greatly enjoyed the process of creating this edition of the HHJ, but the end of this school year has also seen the relevance and consequence of the journal’s themes demonstrated in an unavoidable way. As I write this, COVID-19 has become a global pandemic, affecting well over a hundred countries and disrupting travel and normal operations even at UNC. Although none of the pieces in this issue of the journal touch on the coronavirus itself, as they were all written much earlier in the semester, we believe they still offer a reflection on the sometimes unsettling shared omnipresence of health. We are all individual, creative in our own right, and more separate than we often wish to be. But experiencing illness, grappling with our own health, and contending with what it means to live in a body in this ever more connected world reveal a greater universality, which many of these poems and essays tap into. In this issue, we are proud to include the journal’s first international publication, seeing our work in the health humanities reflected in the common themes and topics of a Canadian creative writing competition. Another poem explores the way we talk about health, literally, across a language barrier and cultural divide, questions that are echoed in another essay that explores the implications of global public health on cultural burial practices and demonstrates how health dovetails with religion and governance, inextricable from the daily exercise of our lives. In these works, a character in a short story on the diagnosis of an STD grapples with responsibility and blame, an undiagnosed disease refuses to release its hold on a frustrated student, and poets desperately attempt metaphors to convey the experience of mental illness or of watching someone else in pain. We cannot escape our own encounters and trials with health. It sways everything from the world at large down to the smallest infant in the NICU. Yet for as many myriad experiences of illness and medicine as we live through, there are just as many ways of expressing them through the humanities: through poetry, through fiction, through personal narrative and research and art, all of which we hope to showcase in this journal.
