“Illness calls for stories”: care, communication, and community in the COVID-19 patient narrative

Abstract

This creative-critical piece reflects on the practices of recording, communicating, and caring that took place on social media and in digital spaces during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using my own experience of contracting COVID-19 as a starting point, the piece looks at the ways in which epidemics have often been recorded in collaborative ways, with the personal, professional, and familial converging in historical texts that could be used as sources of medical authority. COVID-19 has similarly been immortalized across a variety of forms and by different communities. The piece particularly explores the ways in which collective epidemic experience has been represented online through autopathographical Tweets, TikTok cures, and group chat messages and the future purposes that such collaborative patient narratives can serve.

Metadata

Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Crocker, R. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5871-1556
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2024. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Keywords:	COVID-19; Community; Curative recipes; Narratives of care; Social media
Dates:	Accepted: 4 December 2023 Published (online): 13 February 2024 Published: September 2025
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > School of English (Sheffield) > Department of English Literature (Sheffield)
Date Deposited:	06 Oct 2025 13:45
Last Modified:	06 Oct 2025 13:45
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1007/s10912-023-09835-9
Related URLs:	PubMed URL
Sustainable Development Goals:
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:232574

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“Illness calls for stories”: care, communication, and community in the COVID-19 patient narrative

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