“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 lives, that human history is largely the story of human choice. Perhaps this is why rumors have swirled for millennia that Alexander the Great died of poisoning even though he almost certainly died of typhoid or malaria. We simply don’t want a world where even the most powerful emperor can be felled by mere infection. But history, alas, is not merely a
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