Book Review: "The Great Shadow" by Susan Wise Bauer

There was no reason why I would choose this book to read apart from the fact it had an interesting subtitle and the cover looked quite telling. I like it when the cover to a book looks like it has been worked on to hide things within. I also ended up reading the blurb to the book only to realise it was not only nonfiction, but the topic was about to be expanded upon in a whole host of ways. From how survival instincts move us from cold to hot and back to cold environments all the way through to why children were dying at a similar rate as adults in some cases. We are taken through a look at how sickness, once treated as an individual thing, moved to a group thing and thus, came to change the way we buy things and spend our lives. The COVID pandemic may have taught us somewhat about that, but who knew our everyday consumerism is coated with a deep fear of getting sick?

As we travel through time, we visit the Pre-Socratics and the ways in which they rationalised sickness. One of the points I found quite thought-provoking was the way in which they thought about the sickness as a part of the body rather than how we think about it today, apart from the body. Bauer describes this in a way of us trying to give it a name so that we can have a form of 'face' we are fighting against. It is not something within us, but something that happens to us that requires to be extracted. This links to a later point Bauer makes in that many people once believed that sickness was spiritual and thus, theories regarding sickness being apart from the body are already forming. She connects this on to the COVID pandemic in which people were becoming more spiritual about sickness. Anti-vaxxers are often known for their alignments to militant Christianity as well, though not all of them are. Bauer makes these constant connections throughout the book so as to help us understand how we forever return to certain beliefs about sickness whether we are advanced in our medical knowledge or not.

She makes points about medicine and the way in which doctors who practice in our own time are similar to those who practiced in the ancient eras in that they have their own private language, their own boundaries and guidelines and thus, they are also in need of a private education which is only available to the very few. As someone who is more than often questioning medical advice as I don't like to take everything at face value, I'm pretty sure that this is not malicious but simply because the access to who can assign medications needs to be controlled or you could possibly kill someone. Bauer often writes upon the point that doctors are sometimes like priests in this sense - they have a great amount of power over the victim who is suffering and there are a bunch of rituals involved in order to make them better. In many ways, modern medicine is based within ancient religious practices. It is an odd thing to think about, but it makes sense.

She also shows us how various people - or rather groups of people - were blamed for diseases spreading. For example: she states that polio was once thought to be spreaded by Italians and cholera, by the Irish. But there have been no group in human history who have been more blamed for illnesses spreading than the Jewish. Honestly, this is heavily racist and not fair at all, but I know that once in a time, Hitler used the language of cleanliness to subjugate the Jewish community. He basically called them phrases like 'parasites' in order to make others believe that they were unclean and thus, get people to remove themselves from their vicinity. It's disgusting behaviour and a horrid use of language. Anti-semitism is rife with language blaming the Jewish community for illness, disease, the ravages of plague and even COVID. If you honestly think that you can blame an entire disease on a group, nationality, or religious faction of people then I'm not sure what to tell you but you couldn't be more wrong if you tried.

So how does this all influence what we buy? We buy wellness fluids, herbal teas, charcoal toothpaste and other things to fend off illnesses because why else do we buy it? Oh, right we buy it to 'stay healthy'. Staying healthy is also staying without illness though. Susan Wise Bauer makes so many great points via reporting fantastical anecdotes that are also strangely relatable - some of which come in the form of taking ibuprofen. I'm not going to say too much about that little story between the modern and the old, but it links to the other points regarding how sickness influences what we buy. You will also see the linkage between the medical community and the ritual of religious communities.

As we move through the book, we also get information about vaccines and how they were formulated and why some people today, are still distrusting of them. From using substances to change the way we feel all the way through to looking at how COVID changed everyone and how they act towards illness today - Bauer spares no single point in order to teach us a very important lesson about ourselves. We spend a lot of money fending off sicknesses, but we also spend a lot of time dealing with it all the same.