Exploring the Human Impact of Public Health Interventions in T.C. Boyle’s “The Fugitive”

Abstract

AbstractIn T.C. Boyle’s (Boyle, The Relive Box and Other Stories. HarperCollins, New York, 2017) short story, “The Fugitive,” the public health practitioners treating the protagonist, Marciano, for tuberculosis (TB) override his right to decide his own treatment plan. Marciano’s struggles show an inherent conflict in public health ethics between protecting the community from infectious diseases and respecting a person’s right to autonomous decision making. Public health officials in the story failed to treat him as a human being by not eliciting his illness narrative. To avoid these failures in the future, we recommend that public health officials adopt a narrative-based approach to policymaking and training public health practitioners. Doing so will help public health officials build trust in healthcare institutions, thereby increasing compliance with public health measures. In this chapter we will explore Boyle’s story as a way to frame concerns about the effectiveness, utility, proportionality, and necessity of the public health measures taken in this case.