Medical Humanities Reveals the Neglected Aspects of the Covid 19 Pandemic

Authors

  • Alireza Monajemi
    monajemi@med.mui.ac.ir
    Department of Philosophy of Science and Technology, Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies (IHCS), Tehran AND Department of Medical Humanities, Virtual University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran, Iran, Islamic Republic of
  • Gholamhossein Moghadam-Heidari Department of Philosophy of Science and Technology, Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, Tehran, Iran, Iran, Islamic Republic of
  • Hamidreza Namazi Department of Medical Ethics, School of Medicine AND Medical Ethics and History of Medicine Research Center, Tehran University of Medical Sciences AND Department of Medical Humanities, Virtual University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran, Iran, Islamic Republic of
Vol 8, No 2: 2021
Theoretical Study(ies)
May 29, 2021

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The Olympiad for Medical Sciences Students has been held in the field of medical humanities for several years in Iran. This year, with the outbreak of the corona pandemic, the question arose as to whether this student competition could be adapted to this new and complex situation. This article will explain the joint efforts of the scientific committee and biomedical students to address this challenge. The main question we had to answer was whether the medical humanities have anything to say in the face of the corona pandemic. The danger we felt was that as the corona pandemic crisis deepened, the biomedical narrative would fill the entire discourse, and this would ultimately lead to the ineffectiveness of corona interventions and policies. This paper shows how these questions were addressed through an action research that the scientific committee, as an interdisciplinary team, and several groups of medical students have worked on together. The result showed that criticism of classical medical humanities, return to the roots of interdisciplinarity, attention to the role of technology, and the crucial role of biopolitics are the neglected aspects of the Covid 19 pandemic.