Our Malady
Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary
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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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Historian Snyder (The Road to Unfreedom) frames this searing critique of the American health-care system around his own recent medical emergency. After a series of medical mistakes related to an appendectomy, Snyder nearly died before undergoing surgery for a severe liver infection in December 2019. Doctors treating the appendicitis had seen a lesion in his liver but did nothing to treat it; a different set of doctors botched a spinal tap and missed clear indications of a liver problem in Snyder's medical records. These were not isolated mistakes, according to Snyder, but symptoms of a systemic failure in which doctors and nurses are not given enough time to meet with patients and truly assess their needs, and are encouraged to prescribe medication rather than get to the root of the problem. Snyder also contrasts his wife's medical care during pregnancies in Vienna and the U.S., and sketches the Trump administration's inadequate response to the Covid-19 pandemic. According to Snyder, the present state of health care violates America's founding principles: "Freedom is impossible when we are too ill to conceive of happiness and too weak to pursue it." Though he doesn't offer much in the way of specific solutions, Snyder draws valuable context and insight out of his harrowing personal experience. The result is a troubling portrait of a system in which the patient is the last priority.
