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On Disease

2022-06-21 · letter vlog · John · 3:59 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Health (also: Personal life) · mode: Personal essay · tags: heavy topic

Starting from a new arthritis diagnosis, John argues that disease, a major historical force largely shaped by poverty and human systems, deserves more attention, and that naming illnesses as the body's failures leads us to imagine disease as a personal failing, when our collective choices are what is responsible.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — The hand doctor, the 250,000 signatures and a new arthritis diagnosis

  • ★★ John saw his hand doctor because his hand isn't working perfectly; the doctor recalled advising him to sign less, after which John signed 250,000 copies of The Anthropocene Reviewed. (playful) — 00:00:00 · The Anthropocene Reviewed (book)
  • ★★★ John says one of his problems is arthritis: terrible news, with the silver lining that he gets to add to his catalogue of itises. (playful) — 00:00:00

00:00:29 — John's catalogue of itises and why illness should be a prime theme of writing (Virginia Woolf)

  • ★★ John lists the itises he has or has had: orbital cellulitis, eosinophilic esophagitis and viral meningitis, besides ordinary ones like sinusitis and gastritis. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ John says he is not unique: most people become very familiar with itises because we have a consciousness made out of meat. — 00:00:29
  • ★★★ Asked why he writes so much about illness, disease and our historical responses to them, John asks why everyone isn't writing about it. — 00:00:29
  • ★★★ Virginia Woolf (quoted): John quotes Virginia Woolf: given how common illness is and how great the spiritual change it brings, it is strange that illness is not a prime theme of literature. — 00:00:58
  • ★★★ John says historical narratives focus on kings, wars and political philosophies, but disease is a terribly important historical force, maybe the most important. (hedged) — 00:00:58

00:01:27 — Disease as a historical force: tuberculosis versus war, deaths from disease, inequity, and why John writes about it

  • ★★★ John says that over the last 2,000 years more people almost certainly died of tuberculosis than in all wars combined. (hedged) — 00:01:27 · tuberculosis
  • ★★★ John says more people died of tuberculosis than in war last year (2021), and in every year back to World War II. — 00:01:27 · tuberculosis
  • ★★★ John says around 93% of all humans die from disease, so commonly that we attribute these deaths to natural causes. — 00:01:27
  • ★★★ John says there is nothing natural about people dying of cholera in Haiti but not in the United States. — 00:01:56 · United States, health equity
  • ★★★ John says poor people in the United States are almost twice as likely as rich people to develop heart disease. — 00:01:56 · United States, health equity
  • ★★★ John says he writes about disease, from OCD in Turtles All the Way Down to plague in The Anthropocene Reviewed, because it strangely circumscribes consciousness and we don't talk about it enough. — 00:01:56 · Turtles All the Way Down, The Anthropocene Reviewed (book)

00:02:26 — What '-itis' means, disease imagined as a failure of the self, and collective responsibility for illness

  • ★★ John explains that -itis means inflammation: the suffix names not the infection but the body's response to it, or in autoimmune diseases like esophagitis, the body mistaking healthy cells for threats. — 00:02:26
  • ★★ John says he got orbital cellulitis because bacteria invaded the soft tissue between his eye and brain, but the name means his own white blood cells caused swelling behind his eye. — 00:02:26
  • ★★★ John argues we describe illness as failures of the body rather than inevitable side effects of having one, and so imagine disease as a failure of one's self, biology, circumstances or moral choices. — 00:02:55 · just-world hypothesis
  • ★★★ John says examining how we imagine illness is productive because so much illness is caused not by bacteria or viruses but by poverty, lack of clean water and other human-built systems. — 00:03:24 · health equity
  • ★★★ John concludes that imagining disease as about human choice is justified, not because individuals are responsible for their illnesses but because our collective choices are. — 00:03:24

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

People: Virginia Woolf

Works: The Anthropocene Reviewed (book)

Concepts: arthritis · autoimmune disease · cholera · Coronary artery disease · eosinophilic esophagitis · health equity · inflammation · just-world hypothesis · meningitis · obsessive-compulsive disorder · orbital cellulitis · Plague (disease) · tuberculosis

Places: Haiti · United States

Events: World War II

Only in the description or credits: Turtles All the Way Down

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