Once, I went to the emergency room because I thought I had chest pains. It turned out to be a very expensive nothing, but hypochondria has its benefits. For one thing, it encouraged me to read all sorts of fun books about horrifying diseases.
Rabid deals with rabies, an illness that has scared us for centuries. The book claims that rabies might be the origin of all our zombie and vampire stories, which gives the author an excellent excuse to talk at great length about zombies and vampires.
The Emperor of All Maladies is a long discussion of the history of cancer, focusing on humankind's more recent attempts to counteract this flexible, destructive disease. The book does an admirable job of recording the struggle of a great many people against their own rebellious bodies.
But cancer isn't the only popular plague. It also turns out that lots of people had syphilis. If the rumors are true, Pox can rightly claim that western civilization caught syphilis when Columbus came back from the Caribbean, and from there it may have spread to the likes of Beethoven, Nietzsche, Hitler, Oscar Wilde, Van Gogh, Schubert, James Joyce, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Guy de Maupassant and even maybe possibly Abraham Lincoln. Syphilis's symptoms are all over the place, so there's a lively debate out there as to which of these people actually had the disease, but the sheer speculation is morbidly enjoyable.
These books are an excellent reminder that my petty chest pains mean nothing in the end. It could be a lot worse.
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