To recalibrate our immune response to levels appropriate to the more benign conditions we experience in everyday modern life, it may be necessary to deploy some benign bullshit.fn3 This, I suppose, was what my grandfather was doing in the days before antibiotics, when he cheered up his patients with banter and encouraged them to wrap up warmly, stay in bed, feed themselves well and drink medicinal whiskies – perhaps prescribing for good measure some ineffectual pills that nonetheless created enough of an illusion of optimism for the patient’s body to enter ‘healing mode’.
