11/11/2025
If you’re a follower of my work, please consider pre-ordering my upcoming book The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy.
This book really grew out of my narrative world history series for W. W. Norton (that would be The History of the Ancient World, The History of the Medieval World, The History of the Renaissance World). I was writing about the rise and fall of kingdoms, the quest of rulers for power, the growth of new nations—but I kept getting distracted by people dying.
Not just people dying, because we all will. But the ways in which they died. The historical characters I was writing about died of the most mundane afflictions. People died of splinters, sore throats, pimples, 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) a**l fistulas. (That would be Henry II, father of Richard the Lionhearted.)
And these deaths are recorded with almost no comment. I was fascinated by this. Writing 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, God and demons, dust and fresh air and food. So I started to dig into the experience of being sick, from ancient times all the way up to the present day.
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 changed about what we believe, think, do, and even buy. You’d be amazed how many phenomenon are rooted in illness—everything from accepting that the earth isn’t at the center of the universe, all the way up to segregated bathrooms, Tupperware, and the Ikea aesthetic in room furnishing.
Now for the pre-order request: One of the very best ways to support a writer whose work you appreciate is to put in a pre-publication order for their next book. It doesn’t matter where you order the book from, or how much you pay. (Discounts are fine!) Pre-orders aren’t important because of money. They demonstrate to book buyers, chains, and distributors how much interest there is in the book. That affects orders placed, the prominence of the book in stores and online, and even what the first print run is. Pre-orders can have a cascading effect on a book’s future, both for the better and for the worse.
So if you find this idea interesting, and if you’d like to read some REALLY vivid accounts of what coming down with the Black Death or consumption was actually like, please order now! I’m including some links for your convenience, but The Great Shadow is available anywhere books are sold—and your local indie bookstore will be more than happy to place the order for you.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250272911/thegreatshadow/
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-great-shadow-a-history-of-how-sickness-shapes-what-we-do-think-believe-and-buy-susan-wise-bauer/93191bf20e696543?ean=9781250272911&next=t
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-great-shadow-susan-wise-bauer/1147243804?ean=9781250272911
https://www.indigo.ca/en-ca/the-great-shadow-a-history-of-how-sickness-shapes-what-we-do-think-believe-and-buy/9781250272911.html
https://www.amazon.com/Great-Shadow-History-Sickness-Believe/dp/1250272912
