Our Malady
Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary
(Sprache: Englisch)
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller On Tyranny comes an impassioned condemnation of America's pandemic response and an urgent call to rethink health and freedom.
On December 29, 2019, historian...
On December 29, 2019, historian...
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller On Tyranny comes an impassioned condemnation of America's pandemic response and an urgent call to rethink health and freedom.On December 29, 2019, historian Timothy Snyder fell gravely ill. Unable to stand, barely able to think, he waited for hours in an emergency room before being correctly diagnosed and rushed into surgery. Over the next few days, as he clung to life and the first light of a new year came through his window, he found himself reflecting on the fragility of health, not recognized in America as a human right but without which all rights and freedoms have no meaning.
And that was before the pandemic. We have since watched American hospitals, long understaffed and undersupplied, buckling under waves of ill patients. The federal government made matters worse through willful ignorance, misinformation, and profiteering. Our system of commercial medicine failed the ultimate test, and thousands of Americans died.
In this eye-opening cri de coeur, Snyder traces the societal forces that led us here and outlines the lessons we must learn to survive. In examining some of the darkest moments of recent history and of his own life, Snyder finds glimmers of hope and principles that could lead us out of our current malaise. Only by enshrining healthcare as a human right, elevating the authority of doctors and medical knowledge, and planning for our children s future can we create an America where everyone is truly free.
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PrologueSolitude and Solidarity
When I was admitted to the emergency room at midnight, I used the word malaise to describe my condition to the doctor. My head ached, my hands and feet tingled, I was coughing, and I could barely move. Every so often I was seized by tremors. The day that had just begun, December 29th, 2019, could have been my last. I had an abscess the size of a baseball in my liver, and the infection had spilled into my blood. I did not know this at the time, but I knew that something was deeply wrong. Malaise, of course, means weakness and weariness, a sense that nothing works and nothing can be done.
Malaise is what we feel when we have a malady. Malaise and malady are good old words, from French and Latin, used in English for hundreds of years; in American Revolutionary times they meant both illness and tyranny. After the Boston Massacre, a letter from prominent Bostonians called for an end to the national and colonial malady. The Founding Fathers wrote of malaise and malady when discussing their own health and that of the republic they founded.
This book is about a malady not my own, though mine helped me to see it, but our common American one: our public malady, to borrow James Madison s phrase. Our malady is physical illness and the political evil that surrounds it. We are ill in a way that costs us freedom, and unfree in a way that costs us health. Our politics are too much about the curse of pain and too little about the blessings of liberty.
When I got sick at the end of last year, freedom was on my mind. As a historian, I had spent twenty years writing about the atrocities of the twentieth century, such as ethnic cleansing, the Nazi Holocaust, and Soviet terror. Recently I have been thinking and speaking about how history defends against tyranny in the present and safeguards freedom for the future. The last time I was able to stand before an audience, I was giving a lecture about how America could
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become a free country. I hurt that evening, but I did my job, and then I went to the hospital. What followed has helped me to think more deeply about freedom, and about America.
When I stood before the lectern in Munich on December 3rd, 2019, I had appendicitis. That condition was overlooked by German doctors. My appendix burst, and my liver became infected. This was neglected by American doctors. That is how I ended up in an emergency room in New Haven, Connecticut, on December 29th, bacteria racing through my bloodstream, still thinking about freedom. In five hospitals over three months, between December 2019 and March 2020, I took notes and made sketches. It was easy to grasp that freedom and health were connected when my will could not move my body, or when my body was attached to bags and tubes.
***
When I look at the pages of my hospital journals, stained by saline, alcohol, and blood, I see that the New Haven sections, from the last days of the year, concern the powerful emotions that rescued me when I was near death. An intense rage and a gentle empathy sustained me, and provoked me to think anew about liberty. The first words I wrote in New Haven were only rage lonely rage. I have felt nothing cleaner and more intense than rage amidst deathly illness. It came to me in the hospital at night, giving me a torch that ignited amidst kinds of darkness I hadn t before known.
On December 29th, after seventeen hours in the emergency room, I had an operation on my liver. Lying on my back in a hospital bed in the early morning hours of December 30th, tubes in my arms and chest, I couldn t ball my fists, but I imagined that I was balling my fists. I couldn t raise my body from my bed on my forearms, but I had a vision of myself doing so. I was one more patient in one more hospital ward, one more set of failing organs
When I stood before the lectern in Munich on December 3rd, 2019, I had appendicitis. That condition was overlooked by German doctors. My appendix burst, and my liver became infected. This was neglected by American doctors. That is how I ended up in an emergency room in New Haven, Connecticut, on December 29th, bacteria racing through my bloodstream, still thinking about freedom. In five hospitals over three months, between December 2019 and March 2020, I took notes and made sketches. It was easy to grasp that freedom and health were connected when my will could not move my body, or when my body was attached to bags and tubes.
***
When I look at the pages of my hospital journals, stained by saline, alcohol, and blood, I see that the New Haven sections, from the last days of the year, concern the powerful emotions that rescued me when I was near death. An intense rage and a gentle empathy sustained me, and provoked me to think anew about liberty. The first words I wrote in New Haven were only rage lonely rage. I have felt nothing cleaner and more intense than rage amidst deathly illness. It came to me in the hospital at night, giving me a torch that ignited amidst kinds of darkness I hadn t before known.
On December 29th, after seventeen hours in the emergency room, I had an operation on my liver. Lying on my back in a hospital bed in the early morning hours of December 30th, tubes in my arms and chest, I couldn t ball my fists, but I imagined that I was balling my fists. I couldn t raise my body from my bed on my forearms, but I had a vision of myself doing so. I was one more patient in one more hospital ward, one more set of failing organs
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Autoren-Porträt von Timothy Snyder
Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. His books, which have been published in over forty languages, include Bloodlands, Black Earth, On Tyranny, Road to Unfreedom, Our Malady, and On Freedom. His work has inspired poster campaigns and exhibitions, sculptures, a punk rock song, a rap song, a play, and an opera, and he has appeared in over fifty films and documentaries. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Timothy Snyder
- 2020, 192 Seiten, Maße: 11,2 x 15,7 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Verlag: Crown
- ISBN-10: 0593238893
- ISBN-13: 9780593238899
- Erscheinungsdatum: 31.08.2020
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
[Snyder s] litany of the many ways the United States bungled the coronavirus response is eloquent and pointed. . . . His cry of rage is certain to get your attention. The Washington PostCompelling . . . Snyder combines moving personal experience with keen historical and political analysis in Our Malady. . . . A powerful argument for universal health care as a fundamental right. Chicago Tribune
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