History's "Viral" Lessons We Keep Ignoring

The Most Important Question · Apr 7, 2025 · 43m

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…