Our Malady

Prologue

Solitude 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

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.

[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 Post

Compelling . . . 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