A Family History of Illness

"A masterful tale, beautifully written, by a highly accomplished historian at his best. A Family History of Illness is a unique story that brings together personal memoir and medical history with a thoughtful guide and reflection on the craft of history."—Gregg Mitman, author of Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes

"A uniquely talented historian fights the disease that may kill him with research, narrative, and empathy. The result is a moving memoir and profound meditation on living within the histories of our body, family, and environment."—David Armitage, Harvard University

"In another tour de force, Brett Walker traces the entangled social and biological histories that produced his own medical condition and then uses this lens to show how all our histories are thus entangled. The result is a rousing defense of history itself in our age of presentism."—Julia Adeney Thomas, author of Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology

"This book is terrific in five ways I can barely list here.  Fascinating, literate, profound, wondrously variegated, harrowingly personal. Brett Walker, a historian with an eye for science and an ear for language, knows that he and his near-death experience are a synecdoche for the broader issues of disease, memory, selfhood, and history among us all."—David Quammen, author of Spillover