Most of us are far removed from the immediacy of illness. We control it, we medicate it, often with efficacy, forgetting the chronic until we are faced with the acute.
Perhaps I am alone in my mindlessness, perhaps I’m alone in forgetting how closely the people of the past felt their illnesses. I wonder about Fanny Burney and her breast cancer, wonder what became of the autistic children of the past, wonder about the depressed and the suicidal, wonderings prompted by fever, simple fever.
A fever I could not tame for two days, one that kept me soaking my clothes and soaking the sheets, shivering and chattering like victims of ague: it brought me up close to my body and to the inability to control it at will. I thought of stories from the 18th and 19th century, characters sweating through their bedclothes and covers and of the cold wet side of the bed that was mine.
It was so unpleasant, so tiring, so human, to be ill for such a short time that I wondered how on earth one tolerated illness that lasted months or years, especially in the absence of anesthetics, analgesics, antibiotics and the hundreds of other chemicals manufactured for our comfort and safety. I wondered about the pain of the past: could I have borne the pain endured by Fanny Burney, mastectomy without anesthetic? Probably not, since I could hardly stand the pain of being stitched after the caesarian section, a process that felt like having my uterus removed from the outside with fishhooks. The cutting was easy, swift, single-motion; the sewing was slow, the needle poked and tugged through resistant flesh layer by layer, muscle by muscle, until the final flesh was stapled
Now the child has it, the start of the fever and a nasty cough. He takes illness less well, just as he often seems to be ill when I need him to be well.








