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 2021Chapters 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 WebersVerstehen 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.

Therese (Tess) Jonesis Associate Director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities and Director of the Arts and Humanities in Healthcare Program at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.  She is a Professor in the Department of Medicine.  Jones is the editor of the Journal of Medical Humanities; lead editor for the Health Humanities Reader (Rutgers University Press 2014); and co-editor of the upcoming Handbook on Health and Media (under contract with Routledge Publishing).  She teaches health humanities and disability studies in the Schools of Medicine and Pharmacy and the Physical Therapy and Physician Assistants Programs.  She developed the undergraduate Health Humanities Minor for the University of Colorado Denver and the Graduate Certificate in Health Humanities and Ethics.  She is involved with the American Association of Medical Colleges initiative on the humanities and arts in medical education and has and is serving on sub-committees to design and implement the new Trek Curriculum in the School of Medicine.    Katheen Pachucki is the editorial assistant of the Journal of Medical Humanities and divides her time and expertise between JMH and a publication from the American Society of Microbiology.

The COVID Pandemic: Selected Work.- Planetary Health HumanitiesResponding to COVID Times.- Placing the Blame: What If They REALLY Are Responsible?.- COVID-19, Contagion, and Vaccine Optimism.- Sinophobic Epidemics in America: Historical Discontinuity in Disease-related Yellow Peril Imaginaries of the Past and Present.- Letting Go of Familiar Narratives as Tragic Optimism in the Era of COVID-19.- Masks in Medicine: Metaphors and Morality.- Reading for Pandemic: Viral Modernism by Elizabeth Outka, New York: Columbia University Press, 2020.- The Health Humanities and Camuss the Plague, Edited by Woods Nash, Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2019.- Love in the Time of COVID.- Inflorescence of Mistrust.- A Sick Child is Always the Mothers Property: The Jane Austen Pediatric Trauma Management Protocol.- Beside Oneself with Rage: The Doubled Self as Metaphor in a Narrative of Brain Injury with Emotional Dysregulation.- 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.- The Ethic of Responsibility: Max Webers Verstehen and Shared Decision-Making in Patient-Centred Care.- When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment by Ryan T Anderson.- The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimers Disease Life-Writing by Martina Zimmermann, London, UK: Palgrave McMillan, 2017.- The Art of Death by Edwidge Dandicat, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2017.