The world’s ongoing battle against Covid-19 has been a sobering reminder of our vulnerabilities as human beings. In spite of all our 21st-century luxuries, the fact that a microscopic virus can rampage across the globe and inflict the damage it has done remains difficult to comprehend.
MARY FISSELL is professor of the history of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Her work mainly focuses on how ordinary people in early modern England understood health, healing and the natural world.
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