For a very long time humans have been getting sick. Sometimes we have gotten sick more easily than at other times. From time to time we get sick from things a human body has never before encountered. Sickness is always present with us. And while injury we can understand–like breaking a leg, or having a rock hit your head–sickness can be as mysterious to people in 2026 who trust the science as it was to our ancestors 4,000 years ago.

“Why did one patient heal,” my guest Susan Wise Bauer writes, “while another rotted? And what about the shivering, miserable sufferer who simply awoke with a sore throat and cough, after going to bed healthy and filled with plans the night before? It is the constant presence of sickness, not injury, that has shaped the way we think about ourselves and our world.”

Susan Wise Bauer’s books include The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home (fourth ed., 2024) and The Story of Western Science: From the Writings of Aristotle to the Big Bang Theory. Her most recent book is The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy.

0:00 Introduction 1:45 What This Book Is and Isn't 4:35 Did Hunter-Gatherers Get Sick? 9:50 Guilt and Sickness 14:00 Doctors as Priests 21:30 The Four Humors 25:15 Humoral Theory and Colonialism 29:45 Occasionalism: God's Will and Disease 35:55 The Black Death 40:45 The History of Drugs 45:50 Vaccines: Jenner and Cowpox 50:30 The Early 20th Century: Disease Returns 54:25 The Pax Antibiotica 58:30 Wellness Culture 61:45 COVID and What Hasn't Changed 67:15 Closing

The Great Shadow: Susan Wise Bauer on the History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy