The Great Shadow:
A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy
by Susan Wise Bauer (St. Martin’s Press)
Writing my review for this book was delayed because I got sick. Tested out clear on all the nastier bugs, just a pernicious cold.
Of course, you say, all that reading about disease made you prone to it.
Ah, I say, you have fallen into the trap the book seeks to teach you to avoid.
This is a book about the history of illness. I am already prone to like a book like this about the invisible intellectual architecture of our world, the ideas that we do not think about yet are the Water that creates what ideas we have. It has its limitations: it is not global, and primarily about the West and Near East; not about injury rather than disease, and less about chronic conditions than about infectious diseases. These are reasonable limitations, and the last is the most interesting, in the sense that part of the thesis here is that the paradigm of infectious disease is vital to the cultural (mis)treatment of chronic conditions.
The style is perfect. A touch melodramatic, it consists of introductory vignettes of people, contemporary and ancient, both trying to reckon with disease before discussing the particularities of that point in history. I complain about history writers trying to make something too sexy, but this is the exception that proves the rule. Illness is so personal, and now so prosaic, that it takes narrative flair to stick the point like it needs to. This is not limited to the fear that is illness in the past, but also that same invisible architecture of the present that radically changes how we live and think about living.
Most of the book is history and it is consistently captivating history, because much of the history is about how the language and ideas around illness from discredited science persists into the contemporary world – the fact we call it a cold, for instance. This matters a lot for how we treat one another and our lives.
Likewise, the book sticks the landing on one of my other persisting complaints in non-fiction writing about the flirting with anti-science thinking. There is a temptation in a book like this to oversell the value of science, and the triumph of it over superstition. But as often as not, it is a triumph of empiricism. It is not the vaunted scientific method at work but a real jumble of following lines of results. Everything is obvious, once you know the answer. This has big effects for how to look at bad ideas about health, medicine, and science, and policy choices in general.
The kinda sorta problem here is that there is a bit of a formal mismatch between the facts and the conclusions. The range of discussion gets briefer the closer the book gets to the contemporary day, to the point that the end feels a bit abrupt. The place where the overall thesis is going is a retake on the Pax Antibiotica and how much that dismal side of that has come to control contemporary life. There is a sort of negative space sense to this in terms of the rest of the reading, that the conclusion is established by how much this was not the case earlier in human history. But the body of the text being primarily about the ways in which the past affects the present thinking, maybe not always negatively but to great extent, feels disconnected.
Still, this is an unreserved recommendation, as that just makes it more like two excellent books, both that could have been expanded on further, and probably with a third in there for the issues skipped in the process. You will not think about the world the same way.
My thanks to the author, Susan Wise Bauer, for writing the book, and to the publisher, St. Martin’s Press, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 