Tailored from The Nice Shadow: A Historical past of How Illness Shapes What We Do, Assume, Consider, and Purchase, by Susan Sensible Bauer. Copyright © 2026 by the creator and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press.
CHAPTER 1: THE PRISM
Our our bodies are the crossroads the place our most personal selves meet the world exterior, the matrix the place our ideas and feelings and beliefs are fashioned. When our our bodies are functioning nicely—after we are wholesome, robust, energetic, pain-free—we don’t discover how our bodily existence impacts these ideas, feelings, and beliefs.
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However let a grain of sand grit its means into the works, and instantly all the things adjustments.
Essentially the most historical tales we possess inform us this. Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu barrel via the Mesopotamian panorama, blithely elevating hell wherever they go, till fever shoots via Enkidu. All of a sudden, the hardened warrior Gilgamesh is dithering round his good friend’s mattress in agonized confusion, the trajectory of his triumphant life halted lifeless. Job luxuriates in his fields and herds and household. Then carnage descends on his livestock and youngsters and his personal physique, and he sits within the ashes, scraping his boils with a potsherd. His total world is overthrown, the dysfunction in his physique the final and best expression of the household disaster.
Illness is just not “simply” illness. Illness is probably the most intimate expression of our vexed relationship with actuality, the place the place clean functioning instantly fractures and spins aside with out warning. Illness is the good mirror that displays again our most pressing query: Why does calamity descend with out warning? How can we clarify it? How will we keep away from it? How will we struggle again?
Our evolving understanding of what makes us sick, and the way, is a prism via which our notion of the surface world has at all times filtered. As we investigated the causes and cures of illness inside us, we started to vary our views of the universe exterior. When no rationalization for sickness was out there, we pleaded with and worshipped deities. When sickness was considered associated to the stability of humors, we turned obsessive about equilibrium and symmetry. Once we found germs, we created an antiseptic tradition; since person-to-person an infection was the idea du jour, we developed a Tupperware-enclosed, plastic-wrapped, disposable world, and instituted separate consuming fountains and bogs for individuals who carried “totally different” kinds of germs. Once we thought we’d conquered an infection, lastly triumphing over sicknesses that had plagued humanity from the start of reminiscence, we jubilantly turned our focus outward, appeared as much as house, and aimed for the celebs.
And now that we notice viruses may need the higher hand in any case, we implement borders, fearing outsiders as carriers of “illness”; we mistrust the suggestions of medical science (we really feel it has failed us, in any case), in order that vaccine-denying turns into modern, homeopathic cures and magnetic therapies are embraced, power therapeutic prospers.
And, in our worry, we predict the top of the world.
These are phases of understanding. However the outdated outdated understandings of sickness don’t merely disappear. They linger on. This dissonance typically reveals up in innocent and passing methods (as when a twenty-first-century guardian, totally conscious {that a} virus causes the widespread chilly, yells, “Don’t go exterior with moist hair otherwise you’ll catch a chilly!”). But it surely additionally causes sharp rifts: A Canadian teenager trusting in God to heal her is pressured by a courtroom to obtain a blood transfusion; anti-vaxxers flip their backs on germ principle and depend on correct life stability (yogurt, herbs, cold-water baths) to maintain their youngsters secure.
Our contradictory, overlapping concepts about illness create layers of pressure, edges of battle, deadly inconsistencies.
Our concepts about illness, not harm. It’s necessary to distinguish between the 2 (as many histories of drugs don’t).
From probably the most historical occasions, people understood harm. Sickness may descend from nowhere, however the supply of bodily harm was at all times clear—whether or not you had been trampled by a mastodon, crushed by a falling block of Egyptian limestone, skewered by a bolt from a medieval crossbow, or felled by a bullet from a nineteenth-century Colt revolver. Coping with harm could be difficult and the aftereffects puzzling, however the trigger was apparent. Whether or not by rock, sword, cannon, or bomb, the physique was shattered. There was no thriller as to how or why. Essentially the most historical medical texts all contain this type of harm. Students of medical historical past have marveled over the Papyrus, an Egyptian treatise whose suggestions reveal an anachronistically expert understanding of bodily trauma. With a surprisingly acute sense of scientific methodology, attending physicians had been suggested to rigorously look at wounds to the brow, or fractures of arm bones, or slashes throughout the neck or cheek; gods and demons are notably absent, commonsense prescriptions for ache aid and wound care dominate.
However dig slightly bit deeper into this earliest of “scientific” monographs, and we discover decidedly much less rational secondary suggestions. If the harm, correctly cared for, didn’t heal as anticipated, practitioners had been inspired to “drive out the enemy throughout the wound” by calling on Isis, begging her to dispel the “hostile power throughout the blood, the robber of Horus,” the enemy of man that at all times bent its malevolent power towards the residing soul.
The surprising turning of a wound was, like sickness, a thriller. Each arrived with out herald, with out seen company. The Theban doctor knew what had brought about that facial laceration: Falling masonry was an ever-present historical menace. However why did one affected person heal, whereas one other rotted? And what in regards to the shivering, depressing sufferer who merely awoke with a sore throat and cough, after going to mattress wholesome and crammed with plans the night time earlier than?
It’s the fixed presence of illness, not harm, that has formed the best way we take into consideration ourselves and our world.
