It is a strange fact of human history that we tend to focus so little on disease. In my college survey course about the history of humans, I learned of wars and empires and trade routes, but I heard precious little of microbes, even though illness is a defining feature of human life. 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.”
