The Great Shadow

 The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy, by Susan Wise Bauer

 My old homeschooling guru, SWB, has also written quite a bit of history, and when she got to the Renaissance she was struck by how very many ways there were to die gruesomely back then: 

I was writing about the rise and fall of kingdoms, the quest of rulers for power, the growth of new nations—but I kept getting distracted by people dying.

Not just people dying, because we all will. But the ways in which they died. The historical characters I was writing about died of the most mundane afflictions. People died of splinters, sore throats, pimples, earaches. They died of abscesses in their tonsils, of eye infections, of sore knees and infected toenails. They died of stomach aches and coughs and fevers and (my personal obsession) anal fistulas. (That would be Henry II, father of Richard the Lionhearted.)

And these deaths are recorded with almost no comment. I was fascinated by this. Writing history requires you to try to see the world through the eyes of your subjects, not import modern sensibilities back into their time. When we wake up with a sore throat, or run a splinter into our finger, we sigh and take an antihistamine, or pull the splinter out and put some antibiotic cream on the wound. And then we carry on without thinking much more about it.

But before the late nineteenth century—which is to say, for the vast majority of human history—anything that went wrong with your body could change everything you hoped for, every action you took, your entire future.

I wanted to understand what that felt like. I wanted to know how it affected the way our ancestors thought about each other, the physical world around them, God and demons, dust and fresh air and food. So I started to dig into the experience of being sick, from ancient times all the way up to the present day.

That’s what The Great Shadow is about—not just what it was like to get sick, in 1500 or 500 BCE, in 75 or 300 or 1485 or 1790, but what that changed about what we believe, think, do, and even buy. You’d be amazed how many phenomenon are rooted in illness—everything from accepting that the earth isn’t at the center of the universe, all the way up to segregated bathrooms, Tupperware, and the Ikea aesthetic in room furnishing.

.  Eventually this led to agreeing to write a book about disease, which was immediately followed by Covid -- which gave us all first-hand experience of how humans behave during an epidemic, and slowed down her research considerably.  But the resulting book is worth it.   

What was it like to get sick centuries ago?  What did people think caused illnesses?  Without germ theory, how was a plague understood?  What does it mean that we moderns tend to think about sickness in terms of a war?  How amazing was it to see antibiotics work for the first time -- and how fleeting were those decades when we thought disease would be conquered forever?

SWB dives into these questions with insight, wit, and a wonderful faculty for getting to the fears that rule us even as we tell ourselves how clever we are.  I recommend this one; it's an excellent read.