While New York City was the epicenter of the ongoing global Covid-19 pandemic, Rishi Goyal served as Attending Physician in the Emergency Department at Columbia University Medical Center. Every day, he and his colleagues tended to and cared for patients struck down by this incurable illness as mortalities throughout the city, and throughout the United States, overwhelmed and exposed systems of medical care in America.

At the same time, Goyal is a PhD in English and Comparative Literature, Director of the Medicine, Literature, and Society major at Columbia University, and a coordinator of CHCI’s Health and Medical Humanities Network. That is to say, these sometimes seemingly unbridgeable continents of knowledge—the humanities and the natural sciences—find a meeting point in Goyal.

Recently, CHCI’s Global Programs Strategist, Jason Rozumalski, had a phone call with Goyal in order to talk about the experience of working in Emergency Medicine during the pandemic and how the humanities not only create important ways to make that experience comprehensible but also have the power to transform those experiences into actions toward better care systems and the reimagining of a better tomorrow.

Read the full interview on the CHCI website: https://chcinetwork.org/ideas/humanities-in-the-emergency-room.