(think of the disease’s recurrence in the families of Keats, the Brontës, Emerson, Thoreau, Trollope) and also believe that it revealed something singular about the person afflicted. In a similar way, the evidence that there are cancer-prone families and, possibly, a hereditary factor in cancer can be acknowledged without disturbing the belief that cancer is a disease that strikes each person, punitively, as an individual. No one asks “Why me?” who gets cholera or typhus. But “Why me?” (meaning “It’s not fair”) is the question of many who learn they have cancer.
