While in the ICU with a near-fatal case of pneumonia, Brett Walker was asked, "Do you have a family history of illness?" - a standard and deceptively simple question that for Walker, a professional historian, took on additional meaning and spurred him to investigate his family's medical past. In this deeply personal narrative, he constructs a history of his body to understand his diagnosis with a serious immunological disorder, weaving together his dying grandfather's sneaking a cigarette in a shed on the family's Montana farm, blood fractionation experiments in Europe during World War II, and 19th-century cholera outbreaks that ravaged small American towns as his ancestors were making their way west.
