On Being Ill

And yet, if you attend a college survey on the history of humans, you will learn more of wars and empires and trade routes than of microbes.

As Virginia Woolf wrote in On Being Ill, it is strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

Or put another way, Hamlet never gets a headache, but the rest of us do.

I suspect that we want to imagine we choose our fate, that human history is largely the story of human choice, Like, perhaps that's why rumors swirled that Alexander the Great died of poisoning, even though he almost certainly died of typhoid or malaria.