THE GREAT SHADOW: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy, serious subject...serious treatment

THE GREAT SHADOW: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy
SUSAN WISE BAUER
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From alchemy to wellness culture, from antisemitism to disposable plastic, a gripping account of how getting sick has shaped humanity.

Anti-science, anti-vaccine, anti-reason beliefs seem to be triumphing over common sense today. How did we get here? The Great Shadow brings a huge missing piece to this puzzle—the experience of actually being ill. What did it feel like to be a woman or man struggling with illness in ancient times, in the Middle Ages, in the seventeenth century, or in 1920? And how did that shape our thoughts and convictions?

The Great Shadow uses extensive historical research and first-person accounts to tell a vivid story about sickness and our responses to it, from very ancient times until the last decade. In the process of writing, historian Susan Wise Bauer reveals just how many of our current fads and causes are rooted in the moment-by-moment experience of sickness—from the search for a balanced lifestyle to plug-in air fresheners and bare hardwood floors. We can’t simply shout facts at people who refuse vaccinations, believe that immigrants carry diseases, or insist that God will look out for them during a pandemic. We have to enter with imagination, historical perspective, and empathy into their world. The Great Shadow does just that with page-turning flair.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: It is unbelievably apt that this book was contracted for in 2019. I don't think I need to discuss what happened in 2020. What COVID did was to point up the absolutely amazing progress in medical treatment of disease that we've made...vaccines that have saved tens of millions of lives in the past six years developed in months not years...and how ingrained fallacies are in our species...the social distancing farrago is just miasma theory written in Times New Roman. COVID also caused the author to forego doing in-person research in favor of extensive online research. (If, like me, your eyebrows went up at the mere notion of suchlike in a serious work of nonfiction, cool your jets until you've looked through the over 400 notes and citations that make up a literal quarter of the text.)

As a narrative technique, reconstructions of past actions and attitudes work only as well as the author's ability to convey evidence from the records in appropriate prose. It's a technique I think adds some immediacy to history that otherwise is often dry and tedious. I'm happy to say Author Bauer convinced me to follow her as different events were interpreted as divine wrath, moral turpitude, and individual punishment when most twenty-first century people would see the disease process for the impersonal force it is.

It does lend itself, however, to a discontinuity of time. I followed Author Bauer's conceptual links between topics and strands of evidence without much conscious effort, often thinking "...but what about...?" mere words before she addressed the very question I was still formulating. Others might not find that to be their experience. I mention it as information only. You'll resonate with a less linear presentation in your own way. I can't offer a perfect five because even I was occasionally thrown off the scent of the idea being pursued.

I'm here to tell you I want you to read this book, no matter your beliefs about medicine or science. It is not chiding or minatory to people not in the tent with the believers on either side. It is tendentious; it is not disrespectful. Of course I can say that without hesitation because I agree with Author Bauer. I will offer my main evidence in favor of reading it by saying I was highly resistant to her take on social distancing being modern miasma theory until I read her points about the science for and against it. My mind, in the face of cogently presented and logically mustered evidence, changed.

An author who can get in under my well-entrenched, heavily undergirded arrogant illusion of knowledge deserves your treasure and your eyeblinks.