The great shadow : a history of how sickness shapes what we do, think, believe, and buy / Susan Wise Bauer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bauer, Susan Wise, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Diseases and history.

Health behavior--History.

Health behavior.

Medicine--History.

Medicine.

History of Medicine.

history of medicine.

Diseases--Social aspects.

Diseases--History.

Health--History.

Medical Subjects:

History of Medicine.

Genre:

Informational works.

Physical Description:

viii, 339 pages ; 22 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Other Title:

History of how sickness shapes what we do, think, believe, and buy

Place of Publication:

New York : St. Martin's Press, 2026.

Summary:

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

The prism

Paradise, lost: we move into cities and find ourselves at a point of no return

The birth of guilt: we try to avoid the anger of the gods

Priests and physicians: natural and supernatural separate, but not entirely

Defining disease: we decide that sickness comes from a lack of balance

Interlude: an important historical note

The will of God: plague preserves our conviction that illness is caused by the divine

Poison and pogrom: once again, we blame the Jews

Seeking drugs: we do our best to get rid of our pain

Lost in space: we peer into the human body, and then rethink the centrality of the earth

North and south: Hippocratic theory directs the settlement of new worlds

Seeds of sickness: disease as a thing mounts its return

Passions: disordered emotions become responsible for illness, and psychology is born

Vaccine bewilderment: a new medical advance prevents epidemics, and is understood by almost no one

Resisting contagion: a new theory of how illness spreads encounters the resistance of the respectable middle class

A world of worms: we finally accept the reality of germs

Surrounded by miasma: bad airs and waters hold on to their Hippocratic power, germ theory notwithstanding

Terror: we are surrounded by invisible germs, and can do almost nothing to defend ourselves

Fear of others: we center our anxiety about infection on those who are darker, poorer, and farther away

This is war: military rhetoric changes the way we respond to illness

Disposable culture: our fear of germs leads us to invent a world of things to throw away

Exhilaration: antibiotics and vaccines promise us a resounding triumph

Fragility: we find ourselves cast back into much older ways of thinking

Epilogue: what comes next?

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [305]-324) and index.

ISBN:

9781250272911

1250272912

OCLC:

1513891763

Publisher Number:

CIPO000329970