“Everything feels unprecedented when you haven’t engaged with history,” writer Kelly Hayes once wrote. It’s such an important idea. Historian Dan Carlin wrote in his book The End Is Always Near: Pretty much nothing separates us from human beings in earlier eras than how much less disease affects us. . . . If we moderns lived for one year with the sort of death rates our pre-industrial age ancestors perpetually lived with, we’d be in societal shock.
