As the medical historian Charles Rosenberg asserts, “There is no simple, one-dimensional way to understand those entities we call autoimmune diseases.” Autoimmune diseases have biological markers, but they come and go, and patients’ flares can be exacerbated by stress. Such diseases require us to think about illness in a more complex way than we usually do, a more complex way than twentieth-century medicine did, since it was, at heart, based on the idea that all bodies respond roughly the same way to infection. That perspective is turning out to be oversimplified.
