From Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’ to Somerset Maugham’s ‘The Painted Veil’, stories about epidemics have always had an important role giving meaning to public health crises. So it’s hardly a surprise that Camus’s novel ‘The Plague’ has recently made bestseller lists all over the world. Literary scholar Prof. Kiene Brillenburg Wurth (UU) analyses some of the most brilliant fictions on epidemics. What can we learn from them?