The Spring 2020 cohort of the Collegium Institute Medical Humanities Fellowship only had the chance to meet four times before the COVID-19 pandemic forced the closure of university operations at Penn, cutting the program short. However, the vision of the program has lived on in a very special way.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed vulnerabilities in institutions and a social order long presumed to be reliable. In the United States, which leads the world with over 2 million cases and over 100,000 deaths, tens of millions have lost their jobs. Policymakers at federal, state, and local levels spar over resource allocation and the conflict between individual rights and public health. Morbidity and mortality statistics disaggregated by race reveal the disproportionate impact of the virus on black and brown communities, highlighting the crucial impact of the social determinants of health and our nation’s failure to create equity and justice for minorities inside and outside healthcare. The upheaval brought on by COVID-19 has left no one’s sense of normalcy untouched, even the healthy: Through these months in quarantine, some have found their school and work routines disrupted. Some have been cut off from contact with family members. Still others face food insecurity and homelessness.

The pandemic’s vast repercussions testify to the centrality of physical health in social flourishing, and they provoke the question of how medicine can best serve humanity in crisis.

At the inception of the Medical Humanities Fellowship in 2018, we envisioned that the program would develop its participants’ competence in an approach to medicine care that is person-centered, rather than problem-centered.

The pandemic has demonstrated how illness may acutely disturb many aspects of human experience, and the diverse perspectives of medical humanities provide a helpful framework for processing those varied impacts. COVID-19 has spread over the scaffolding of sociopolitical structures, incapacitated prior modes of relating, and gripped the world’s conscience, pointing towards the need for a holistic outlook in medicine encompassing the sacredness, social context, ethics, art, and humanity of medical care beyond mere physiology.

In spite of the cancellation of the remainder of their seminars, the Spring 2020 faculty and fellows took the initiative to continue engaging with the principles of medical humanities. Given the chance to brainstorm uses for a COVID-19 relief grant made available by the Collegium Institute, we devised a plan to realize the wellness-promoting mission of medical humanities in the form of thoughtfully allocated charity.

Because we were unable to directly support clinical care, the faculty and fellows decided to address social determinants of health in West Philadelphia by distributing food to the needy. We endeavored to aid a diverse group of our local community members, mindful of the fact that the elderly population, low-income communities, and communities of color are at elevated risk for COVID-19. As such, we used the funds to purchase $10 gift cards to Metropolitan Bakery and Jimmy John’s, selected for their proximity to campus and provision of delivery options accessible to those home-bound. We then equally allotted the gift cards to three distributors: Philabundance, the area’s largest hunger relief organization; the Newman Center, Penn’s Catholic community center, and the West Philadelphia Senior Center, a hub of activity for local seniors which runs a home meal-delivery service. In this way, we could support local restaurant businesses, secular and religious nonprofit partners, and the elderly and most at-risk populations of our local community- all at the same time. This gift of at least 90 meals was made possible by the Fellows’ concern and insistence on serving our most vulnerable neighbors, extending the scope of a vision of healthcare beyond immediate patients. It is a selfless, living example of the principles of humanism in medicine that the Fellowship explores and promotes.

Providing an opportunity to respond meaningfully to a public health emergency, the relief grant project served as a sort of practicum for our Fellows. However, the Medical Humanities Fellowship has richly prepared all participants to process and react to the pandemic in numerous other ways.

One takeaway from the students’ study of medical humanities is the importance of the physician’s personal character, a point stressed since antiquity. Today, the caregivers on the front lines of the pandemic must not only provide medicines and procedures, but they must also approach their patients with an orientation of sacrifice and servanthood, including the willingness to risk their own health and safety. They must exercise discerning judgment in the face of ethical dilemmas related to treatment futility and resource allocation in overcrowded facilities, and they must provide comfort and compassion to patients whose fear and loneliness debilitate them alongside respiratory symptoms.

Another lesson is the significance of spirituality and meaning-making for both doctor and patient in medical care, relevant now in the way the pandemic has spurred physicians, patients, and laymen alike to existential questions about faith, hope, purpose, mortality, providence, and prayer in the face of oppressive and life-threatening disease.

One more insight medical humanities offers this crisis is the value of the arts in helping both physicians and patients better listen, communicate, and process the trauma and difficulty of both sides of the clinical encounter. In this pandemic, the transcendent ability of the arts to elicit reflection and create hope and unity is more important than ever.

And yet another is an awareness of the fading art of dying, where the medicalization of death and the push to prolong life at any cost obscure the humanity of the dying process. The tragedy of the mortality widespread in this pandemic cannot be trivialized. But if patients are to die, compassionate care would have them be well as they pass away.

The Collegium Institute’s Medical Humanities Fellows find themselves at a unique juncture in history and experience. We will have lived through the most severe public health crisis to afflict America, and indeed the world, since the 1918 flu pandemic. It will have indelibly touched our lives. Thanks in part to this program and the expertise of the faculty who have led it, we have been equipped to view infectious disease and its personal and social consequences with both critical understanding and empathy. We have practiced the sort of compassion we hope to foster in ourselves in producing a small gift of hunger relief for our neighbors. Finally, we are the healthcare professionals of the future, and we will carry all we have learned from this crisis so we can better serve our patients one day.