Treating disease—whether through herbs or magic or drugs—is unnatural. No other animals do it, at least not with anything approaching our sophistication. Hospitals are unnatural, as are novels and saxophones. None of us actually wants to live in a natural world. And yet we tell ourselves that some—and only some—lives end naturally (which really means “acceptably” or “well”). We construct ideas about what constitutes a good time and manner of death. I recently asked my ten-year-old daughter what constituted a natural death. “Well, you have to be old,” she said. “At least seventy-five. And you
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