The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

by Michael Lewis

In September 2001, he was working in the emergency room at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, in New York City, and preparing to start a fellowship in oncology. On September 11, he moved to a field hospital that arose spontaneously in Stuyvesant High School, where he ran triage for the rescue workers at Ground Zero. Years later he wrote a letter to his newborn son describing the feelings of that moment. What positive I remember about that day and the weeks that followed was the profound social cohesion and solidarity of communities and the desire of individuals to serve and contribute. That sounds, superficially, like patriotism and in a sense it is patriotism of the best sort but in fact, at least for me, it was more complex than that. What we experienced had more to do with communities coming together than it did with a sense of national identity. It had more in common with the social cohesion that occurs after a tornado or hurricane, at least for the first few days, than it did with the nationalism of people at war.