The Invisible Kingdom

Drawing on her own medical experience as well as fifteen years of interviews with doctors, patients, researchers, and public health experts, Meghan O''Rourke''s incisive new work speaks to an urgent subject: the epidemic scale of autoimmune disease in America - even greater with the advent of ''Long Covid'' - and where we go from here. Blending lyricism, erudition, candor, and empathy, O''Rourke reveals crucial, subtle complexities about the American struggle with chronic illness and autoimmune conditions, and offers new reasons for hope, as well as a new framework for thinking about infectious disease and autoimmune response going forward. Confronting everything from the challenges of diagnosis and treatment to the limitations posed by our traditional structures of medical care and the particular impact on various demographic populations, O''Rourke brings her deep and disparate talents and roles-critic, journalist, poet, teacher, and patient - together into one unified project, synthesizing the personal and the universal to help all of us through this new frontier.