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Alleviating the suffering associated with adverse health conditions involves not only developing new medical treatments.

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It also requires fundamentally changing how people treated themselves one another and the planet.

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Welcome everybody.

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I am maternally LA Research Fellow at the Queens College University of Oxford today, I am really delighted to welcome a distinguished guest,

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Karen Thurman, who is the author of The Word We Which I Hope and this first episode of Translating COVID 19.

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Welcome, Karen. Thank you for having me.

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Today's event is Harry Truman, leaving professor in Literature and Professor of East Asian Languages and civilisations at Harvard University.

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Karen is author of multiple publications, including more than 70 articles and book chapters,

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and three monographs which have shaped and transformed themes such as comparative literature,

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world literature, global literature, environmental humanities, medical humanities, diaspora and translation.

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Karen's latest book, entitled Global Healing Nature Advocacy Care, was published by Brill in March 2020.

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Global Healing, which we will discuss today, engages with literature and other writings from six continents,

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more than 50 countries and more than two dozen languages from Afrikaans to.

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I feel immensely privileged to be able to reflect, together with such a perceptive author as Karen around issues of contagion,

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global policy and care at these challenging times. Karen, I would like to start by quoting the words of Vicki Dimock, professor of English at Yale.

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Professor Dimock has noted that global healing offers a new geography,

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a new methodology and a new archive connecting the Americas to Asia and Africa and through that expanded sphere of analysis.

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Speaking to the world health crisis with a new urgency and authority.

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Could you tell us what you understand by global healing and how this nation could help us

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alleviate or treat coronavirus disease loss in medical settings and society more generally?

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And thank you so much for having me on today. Level Haley refers broadly to shattering stigma surrounding the disease,

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said some other serious health conditions refers to humanising health care by fully implementing person focussed care.

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Now, Scott refers to find words partnerships.

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The current pandemic, notwithstanding improvements in human health, have been monumental over the past century, and there is much to celebrate.

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But inequality and other injustices continue to contribute significantly to large scale health problems,

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alleviating the suffering associated with adverse health conditions and developing new medical treatments.

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New medical procedures that also involves instituting new forms of interpersonal interactions between patients and physicians.

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But much more than that, it requires fundamentally changing how people treat themselves, how they treat one another and how we treat the planet.

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So this is really everything from how we interact with our loved ones and strangers alike within families,

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health care settings and working on the types of leaders and policies we support and for whom and what we advocate and literature needs.

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A lot of literature over the last decades reveals that no matter how sophisticated our medical technology and treatments,

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tremendous suffering will continue unless we shatter these segments of this class of care, unless we prioritise care friendships.

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Now, regarding the second part of your question, which is how understandings of global healing can treat or alleviate the cold front of virus,

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I think we need to think about this both in the medical setting and in society.

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And I'll go back to this three pronged approach of signals on health care and partnerships.

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Societies regularly adopt prejudicial attitudes toward individuals with certain conditions.

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Societies promote unfounded assumptions, beliefs,

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biases about people who have particular conditions and even more destructively building on these prejudices.

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Societies frequently subject individuals with adverse health conditions and also

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their families a lot of times to discriminatory and often devastating treatment,

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ranging from silencing and labelling to physically attacking, if not murdering.

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And, of course, global healing. I talk about how stigmas work piece of democracy.

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And since this year's HIV aids, as well as Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia regarding COVID 19, we don't really know yet.

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Stigmas will play out. But internal evidence are actually a lot more than anecdotal evidence so far

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suggests that it's not only people with the disease who have been stigmatised,

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but also families of people with the disease and in that society and some societies,

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health professionals who are seen as carriers of the disease or perhaps not doing enough,

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even though they're devoting themselves to curing patients and also humanising health care, will go a long way to helping us with this crisis.

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And what I mean when I talk about humanising health care,

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talk about person focussed care is care in which patients are engaged with as individual people who

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have agency care where patients are listened to their backgrounds and experiences are respected,

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their priorities are understood. But it's also care where everyone in the medical setting is able to have their needs that have their voices heard.

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And it's really a group effort. It's really a joint effort.

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I think what we've seen with COVID 19 is a lot of this kind of person focussed care where physicians and nurses and technicians are going

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all out to help patients to help nations not only medically but also emotionally and in some cases spiritually because of this distancing.

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And if we're only in terms of prioritising partnerships and in the book, I emphasise the importance of strengthening partnerships of all kinds,

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but particularly those that will better enable the informal caregiving that actually forms most of the caregiving,

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how much caregiving that goes on as a family in a really broad sense.

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One is biological family, but also one's chosen family. Westwood One surrounds oneself and providing those individuals with resources and strength

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so that they can best help the individual who still while not sacrificing their moment.

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Thank you, Karen. Yes, it is extremely important and my second question in a sense reconnects with the this was the collective,

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the global and the holistic focus of the pandemic.

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And in the introduction to a special literature of literature or sorry, special issues of literature and medicine,

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you write that the medical practises in these courses are amongst the most widely circulated of all activities in the global economy.

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Yet how actual medical care is provided is rooted strongly in local and regional cultural standards.

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So with reference to the current pandemic, how what literature and most specifically literature in translation can help us better understand the ways

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in which discourses on health and disease are being transmitted across national languages and cultures.

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And what do you think is the most important lesson we can learn from these by your culture transfers?

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Thank you, another great question. It's still too early, I think, to see how literature on COVID 19 specifically is translated across borders,

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although I hear them some exciting translations coming out this summer, so I'll be looking for those.

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What I can say thinking about literature, narratives, other diseases is that a trans cultural perspective,

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a trans lingual perspective not to mention a global perspective,

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helps us better, better understand the broader context of individual community, regional and national experiences.

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And it's true that literature occurs most immediately within local systems.

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And that's why in the book, I do think a lot of attention to the specific national,

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cultural, literary and medical context of the narrative inside the cesspit.

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The things that really became clear to me, the more I read, was the value of these narratives beyond their source cultures.

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You know, at the most basic level, adopting this global perspective, which of course, would be impossible, that translation.

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This enables us to see what aspects of this experience might be primarily a function of local systems and what might be more unavoidable.

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I mean, certainly in the case of COVID 19, we know that there are certain aspects of the disease that transcend nationality,

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for instance, individuals of pre-existing conditions. Individuals who are more elderly are at increased risk no matter where they are.

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But it's also very apparent that there are many things that do not said about many things about COVID 19 that do not transcend nationality,

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and there are many places from which we can learn best practises.

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So there are many best practises that that we can that we can learn.

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And we know this because we see infection rates and death rates differ tremendously around around the world.

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And some of these differences resolve differences made in the present and then your past.

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So, for instance, how soon to take the disease seriously, how strongly to enforce physical distancing, how about ultimate testing and so on?

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But also one thing that I think it's become even more apparent than it already was is

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that vulnerability is impacted by actions and inactions of the less immediate past.

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So decisions concerning what constitutes a fair wage, availability of health insurance, availability of quality,

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health care and social support for families and individuals dealing with health crises and so on.

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And so I think we have a tremendous amount to learn from one another, not only in more immediate actions to take one of the great strides,

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but also how we can better support everyone to make everyone more or everyone less susceptible to the pandemic.

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And that makes them in the first place. I think, you know, taking on a global perspective also has a lot of other benefits.

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It gets us, of course, different perspectives. It helps us reach decisions and become more comfortable with those decisions.

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And in the book, I talk a lot about decisions of the end of life,

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which is an issue that's been addressed in literature at least since this century

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of a least wrote about this and can say that we're going to try this out.

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In the book, I talk about narratives from all over the world that address this question of what happens when you have no one

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at the end of life who's begging that you help take their life from them and the agonising decisions and choices,

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the places and burdens this place has on family and loved ones.

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You know, that's an extreme example, but there are many, many other examples we're just reading about experiences of others reading how others have

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with difficult situations can help one make the best decisions for oneself and one's life.

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One's digging global perspective again, which is made possible by translation,

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helps us reduce exceptionalism the feeling that we are or someone else's unique or special or different or particularly deserving or undeserving,

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whether we're talking about superiority or. Right.

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And finally, taking global perspective helps us produce priorities and helps us produce stereotypes.

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Helps us realise or recognise the experiences of expectations regarding illness.

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I fully blame my gender, ethnicity or sexuality or gender or socioeconomic status, or all the ways in which human beings define themselves.

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That the illness experiences for individuals who have an animus, innocence, as well as for those whom they love, are not very individual.

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And that's that's really important for us to recognise, just as it's super important for us to recognise that.

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A lot of times, much of the time,

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individuals to face health conditions faces conditions of their suffering is increased because of decisions that have been made by policy makers,

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by medical establishments, you know, often decades. So yeah, thank you so much, Karen,

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for such an insightful response which shows very clearly the potential of translation to operate both in the private or on a singular,

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on the level of the individual individuality and more globally as a transnational force.

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Thank you so much. And my first question in a sense expands on the on this topic.

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So in your beautiful introduction of the book, you share the journey that led you to the complete completion of this volume.

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So could you tell us a bit more about this process and what role, again, if any,

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this translation play you retrieving examples specifically of non Anglo European and non Anglo American literature and

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by extension of non Anglo American medical practise that can be helpful or revelatory for us to think of something.

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Sure. Sure.

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So the inspirations behind this, but I'll focus first on the inspirations and the translation and inspirations behind the Spark were money.

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They were both professional and personal and in terms of professional inspirations.

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And what were the interests of literature that engages with the scenes that are quite junior thesis back and forth?

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The answer to all the French writer Albert Camus, the cast of the play, which is a lot of attention in recent years, but so many years.

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So it's been it's been an abiding interest, and it's on a section of my previous book on environmental crises and East Asian literature.

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I really wanted to go back or move forward, but go to an interest, you know, work on something which I had a passion for many,

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many years and I thought I was going to do a book on medical humanities and world literature

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because I was also deeply engaged in world literature at the time of publishing a lot of articles.

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And then I realised the two really for my project wouldn't work together that if I were to focus on world literature and medical humanities,

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I wouldn't be able to work as quite as many tracks as I could otherwise,

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because a lot of the materials that I look at are not world literature, right?

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They haven't transcended boundaries there. Some of them are, you know, barely known within their own cultures.

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And so I ended up writing a lot of articles on world literature and then just focussing more in the in this book,

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Global Healing on medical narratives from a broad range of range of cultures.

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And as I said, it's an abiding interest, but also it's part of my commitment to use the skills that we have as far as literature,

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as humanness to address very real global crises and global concerns and challenges.

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I did this the environment in it with a medical cloth and now my my new projects are taking that same approach, I think, you know, personally.

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There were also some personal connexions in that when I was in college,

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I had a very serious case of Lyme disease, which resulted in my being essentially bedridden for two years.

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I mean, I couldn't really stand very much.

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I couldn't think I can concentrate for short term memory.

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American nurses was not good, but obviously I struggled back and graduated from college and then went on for my Ph.D.

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And I think one of the things that really made my process of healing and recovery so much

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smoother than it might have been was not really that I had some amazing physicians.

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I mean, there were there were medicine not only in their medical skills,

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but also in their empathy and their ability to connect with myself and my family.

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And that wasn't lost on me then. And you know,

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it's I read more and more over the years that realise that this is not like my

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experience was not a huge experience at all and that this combination of a real,

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you know, skills and the science of medicine on one hand, but also in how you treat patients, particularly for Lyme disease.

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A couple of decades ago, I was pretty new to seniors, and people didn't know as much about it as they do now and just the impact that an empathic

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physician and nurses and patients could have a huge impact on me regarding the role of translation.

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That's of translations hugely important for the kind of work that I do.

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I mean, I can speak many languages, but as everyone, there are so many more that I can't read them hundreds and hundreds of thousands like.

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So had I not had access to translations, I would have been severely limited in my research and writing and translation also makes

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possible courses that I tried to just say Harvard and so by not finishing my courses.

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I hope to be accessible to all our students, which means that the materials have to be available.

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English translation, although I strongly encourage students to carry the original to read in the original.

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But the basic text for the course would have to be available in translation science currently dependent on translation.

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I just think, though, that when we rely on translation or teaching particular research,

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we do our best to connect with individuals who can read texts in their source cultures.

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I think this is vital that particularly our research that we not give the impression that

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we're talking about the source text if we're not that we talk about text as translation,

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which is usually important work. In and of itself. So so I'm fully in support of efforts to do more of that.

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I think it's just going to say, yeah, so the innocent targets that are non Anglo Euro American medical practise to provide are also vital.

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And certainly, I mean, I'll just give one example here in efforts to reduce disease stigma.

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And we've seen a lot of this to some relation to Alzheimer's disease, to dementia on a smaller scale in parts of Japan and parts of Taiwan,

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creating communities for or adapting local communities to make them more accessible to individuals with memory challenges.

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And its translation that helps us learn about these initiatives and these efforts

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and helps us think about how we could use that in our own society as well.

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And these so-called dementia belligerents, as they're called in some parts of what I know there, some in Europe as well, you know, they do.

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They actually translate really well across cultures. They're not the same in every culture.

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But the basic idea the basic principles are quite are quite similar.

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So I think there's a lot more that we can do there.

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Thank you, Karen, especially for sharing your personal and professional experience so, so beautifully and so honestly as well.

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And I really think that to what you just told us, shows the need to bridge the gap between science and culture and medicine and translation.

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And it also demonstrates the value and the ability of the humanities at large to address and engage with these global challenges.

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And I was the one where you were talking.

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I was thinking about the more the second part of your book on global healing, which is concerned with the distinction between cure,

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understood that the removal of a disease and healing process which has James Carroll put it,

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deals with the concept of wholeness, and as such, it can belong as much to the infirm as that he has.

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So one of the most insightful chapters of your book,

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you claim that finding a cure for disease and curing disease have in many instances become obsessions, and we know it very well at this time.

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So what kind of healing can help us cope with coronavirus disease at a time when a vaccine and a cure for it have yet to become available?

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And also, we need healing, be truly global, or we, language and culture negotiate different sets of needs and responses.

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So we're right in the middle and susceptible to the COVID pandemic now.

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And so finding a cure for the disease or vaccine for the disease are our top priorities, I think I think justifiably so.

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But until a cure or vaccine are found and frankly, after nine to seven as well,

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I think more of our focus has to be on healing and attaining well-being.

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For one thing, we don't know whether COVID is going to turn into a chronic condition.

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For some people, we have heard that was on ventilators are continuing to feel or individuals have been on ventilators,

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but continue continuing to feel the effects of COVID long after released from hospital.

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So we don't know, first of all, whether it's going to be a chronic become a chronic condition.

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But even even if it doesn't, it turns out to be an acute condition.

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We still have to focus on healing, social building, social well-being.

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I think the economy is an injustice in our society in the United States.

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But frankly, many silence globally have become even more obvious and even more here than they already are.

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And I think this is where a lot of the healing is taking place.

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A lot of that will take place locally or regionally within nations.

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A lot of it needs to take place nationally, but I think.

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What's even more, but a tremendous amount of healing has to take place internationally and globally as well.

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I think we've seen that any attempt to think that it's given up a chance in a purely national sense just ends up harming more individuals.

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And so, you know, the healing I talk about in healing is a bit different than, I think the healing that we mostly now in the wake of the pandemic.

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Certainly, I think global healing now put a chapter on that.

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I think the healing that we need now and it's frankly healing, but we need it for a long time.

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It's it's on the social level. It's again addressing these inequalities, these injustices,

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the types of practises we have that makes so many individuals so vulnerable and vulnerable medically,

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but also vulnerable economically and so on economically.

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Also, of course, to me, you know, the tour has gone insane.

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So we need a society to do a much better job of addressing these injustices.

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And so I'm thinking of healing. Let's talk about COVID 19 in an even broader way than I talked about it much, much.

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Thank you, Karen, for touching on these such delicate themes and the urgent and important themes such as the vulnerability and the social injustice.

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And indeed, I would like like to conclude this conversation with a final question that in a sense.

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Challenges a bit like the so-called privileges of literature, all of the of this evidence of disparity, which we can really feel by now because,

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you know, we are rather privileged to be able to talk about these things, but obviously there are people who have not these privileges.

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So in the final pages of global healing, you make two very important and provocative observations.

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So on the one hand, you note that even though we have made remarkable strides in conquering diseases,

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global literature reveals the tremendous work that remains with advocacy, care and ultimately global healing amongst our greatest challenges.

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On the other hand, I have the you're also aware of the need to remember that and I quote again,

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conditions for countless numbers of the world's peoples are far worse than what we encounter in our readings.

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Even if even as these readings provide us with some of the most penetrating insights into the lead experiences of illness.

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So to what extent do you think that we should allow to integrate literature and humanities into medical policy since they would provide,

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at least in most cases,

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a tool to understand and alleviate diseases rather than a solution to eradicate them and call literature, especially literature in translation?

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Help us shape, improve and possibly implement health intervention in humanitarian settings.

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Now, this is another vitally important question. I think literature has been one of the loudest and most persistent voices and revealing the urgency,

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as well as the possibility of transforming treatment and monitoring and sort a sense transforming treatment.

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When I talk about in the book as communities,

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there are works of literature highlighting just how much of the suffering that accompanies certain conditions is caused directly

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and indirectly by social responses to these conditions and the social structures from which of these responses emanate.

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Even more important, I think works of literature vividly depict the intensity of the suffering and underscore the need for care.

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Literature frequently focuses on individual anguish or the anguish of families amongst the broader economic and social dynamics,

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and I think that's uniquely positioned as literature to reveal the deeply penetrating garnered bodies, the current practises,

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as well as the need for significant transformation in how societies prepare for and how we

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respond to crises and how literature's exposure to the suffering people inflict on one another,

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particularly those already dealing with the physical associates of adverse health conditions.

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I think this is literature the potential to motivate private citizens for professionals and policy makers alike.

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I like to demand change, but also to work more effectively and persistently to implement practises instead of healing and wellbeing and to follow up.

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First of all, literature is not an asset here, and what I mean by that is, you know, in my in my book,

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I focus on something that I ensure that by and large are amongst these very persistent voices in revealing the urgency of change.

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But across the centuries, literature has not always played that for literature.

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This is a book that literature was also reinforced. Stigmas reinforced inequalities reinforce prejudices.

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So I want to make it clear that not all literature does, but I just said some literature, zero and formulas no.

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Formal changes in matters of health and wellbeing often occur at the level of policy, with policymakers,

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legislators, bureaucrats, lobbyists, hospital and pharmaceutical executives exerting significant power.

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And so I think personally, it's less a matter for these individuals who hold the most power.

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Actually reading literature themselves, although I know many do,

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but I think it's it's much more or it's much more important to think about society, broader society as a whole as reading narratives,

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talking about noticing that these patterns and these narratives as impacting how people think about what is important,

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what they should advocate for whom they should enact, which office.

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And so it's more interactive, although sometimes, of course, it's quite direct.

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And I want to of here with a quotation from the historian Sarah Lewis quote in the book and I find

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really inspiring where she says the one of the culture sections that access to the world of justice,

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how many movements have begun with the work of art and culture? Some shows in our perceptions of the world entirely that we have to see.

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But I think again, this is playing who has said I think more times than we can possibly imagine.

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And so answer your question directly.

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I think we do need to integrate literature or humanities more broadly and medical training as well as policymaking.

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This helps us better understand the challenges that we face.

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And it absolutely helps us change and remove and ultimately implement interventions

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that will increase the health and well-being of our community in our society.

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Thank you so much for discussion and also for shifting the focus in a sense, from the institutions to the individuals,

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as well as promoting, you know, proposing new ways to, as I said, bridge villages gap between the sciences and humanities.

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And thank you so much indeed for taking us on this journey.

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This has been vigorous and knowledgeable.

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As much of this as being compassionate and humane and as I have tried to express with my question throughout this conversation,

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your book pays tribute to the workings of literature within our bodies and in the world around us.

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And it is also a testimony to the resilience of humankind through our thanks to the media one language.

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So last but not least. Thank you to our listeners for embarking on this global journey with us and with Karen in the attempt to promote healing,

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and we never read these during and after the pandemic. So thank you very much.

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Thank you.