The Great Shadow: A Guest Post by Susan Wise Bauer

By Susan Wise Bauer / January 27, 2026 at 12:01 am

History and storytelling illuminate the surprising ways that illness influenced human views and behaviors throughout time and continues to today. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Susan Wise Bauer on writing The Great Shadow.

Hardcover $30.00

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

By Susan Wise Bauer

In Stock Online

Hardcover $30.00

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.

For many years now, I’ve written big-picture world history narratives—you know, all about the rise and fall of kingdoms, ambitious leaders angling for more power, revolutions, the birth of new nations, sacrifice and heroism, greed and cowardice.

But I kept getting distracted by people dying.

Not just people dying. We’re all going to die. I found myself absolutely fascinated by the ways in which they died. The historical characters I’ve written about died of the most mundane afflictions. They died of splinters, sore throats, pimples, and 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 that’s just the men. Giving birth to the next generation, women died in droves: before labor, or during, or not long after.

All of these deaths are recorded with almost no comment. Usually, the contemporary chroniclers just say: They died.

But no one ever “just dies.” There are so many days and hours and minutes of denial and disbelief and pain and agony that lead up to “they died.”

Why weren’t we paying attention to that?

The honest writing of 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, gods and God and demons, dust and fresh air and food.

Now that we have decades of modern medicine behind us, the way we experience sickness is orders of magnitude away from how our ancestors (for millennia—lived through the same reality. So I started to dig into the experience of being sick, from ancient times all the way up to the present day.

I was absolutely astonished to discover how many bits and pieces of our current culture were born during previous eras of medical understanding—and are still alive and well, even though the understandings of sickness that produced them have been discarded. Scented air fresheners? A holdover from the medieval days of believing that miasma (bad airs) were responsible for sickness. “Put your hat on or you’ll get sick!”—from the eighteenth century days of Hippocratic theory. Disposable paper cups? From the era when we understood something about germs, but had no antibiotics or other defenses against them. There are scores more.

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 experience changed—and is still changing– what we believe, think, do, and even buy.