As Virginia Woolf wrote in On Being Ill, considering “what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light…it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.” Some of this may be due to the nature of pain itself. As Barbara Duden has written, “Pain is in the body. It leaves no trace for the historian, unless complaints about it are recorded.” But I wonder if we also ignore illness because of our bias toward agency and control. We would like to imagine that we captain the ships of our
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