We've spent the last few years learning up close how a crisis like a global pandemic reveals and deepens all of our faults, inequalities, biases, and outright failures of empathy.

But here's the kicker: it's not the first time. Plagues and epidemics have always shown us who we really are. And they've left footprints, good and bad, on our institutions and the stories we tell ourselves.

So why do we keep missing the lessons?

My guest today is Edna Bonhomme, a historian, author, and public health expert who looks at disease in captivity through her own story of near-death illness, Haitian migration, and a lifetime of asking: Why does our world blame instead of heal?

Edna is the author of the new book, A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class and Captivity Shaped Us From Cholera to COVID-19.

If you've ever wondered how pandemics warp our social fabric and what it would take to heal old wounds and stop repeating the same mistakes, stick around.

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INI Book Club:

• The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş
• Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club

Links:

• Read Edna's book A History of the World In Six Plagues
• Keep up with Edna's other work
• Support global and public health with Partners in Health and Doctors Without Borders
• Support independent journalism at places like Democracy Now, The Intercept, and Jacobin Magazine (US), or Novara Media and the Guardian (UK)

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• Produced by Willow Beck
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Mentioned in this episode:

What Can I Do?