Chapter 3: Private Bodies, Public Lives: Learning From and Leading Through the Outbreak Narrative

The theme of this book is “personhood,” a term that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, since the late 19th century has meant the “quality or condition of being a person; esp. personal identity, selfhood.”¹ Personhood might seem simple; after all, we are all persons. Yet, given the rich discussion and debate over what it means to be a person—whether the mark is consciousness, a soul, the capacity for language, individuality, or mortality— a deceptively simple word proves quite ambiguous indeed. Part of the work of this text must be, then, to address the important, looming question: what do we mean by personhood?