ABSTRACT
N ow let’s turn to the patient. Much of what follows—attachment to magic, terrible drugs, shrugging off of symptoms that would send us bolting for the emergency room—will not be comprehensible unless we remember how often death once appeared in the midst of life. If you were born a male in Massachusetts in 1850, you would have had a life expectancy at birth of thirty-eight years. The figure is so low because it includes infant mortality, in an era when one child in eight would not survive to the age of one. But even if you made it to age twenty, you’d still live only to about sixty. 1
