The politics of the surgical mask: Challenging the biomedical episteme during a pandemic

Abstract

COVID-19 has seen politicians use a selective ‘science’ to justify restrictions on mobility and association, to mandate the wearing of face masks, and to close public infrastructure. There seems to be no role for health humanities scholars as yet, but perhaps there should be. This paper considers the fate of a health humanities article on surgical mask use that was published in a biomedical journal in 2016. This article, which did not operate from within the biomedical episteme but which was in conversation with the episteme, was misappropriated on both sides of the political spectrum to justify personal beliefs around mask use in the pandemic. This mistaken misappropriation is not only evidence of the utility of the common ground shared between biomedicine and the health humanities, it is also evidence of the possibilities inherent in a future interdisciplinary involving biomedicine and the health humanities.