Theory of Illness

English is cruel because it’s language so it has to be, a jealous shadow of the world and its conflagrations. The last few days of summer its cruelty gains further definition, this time while I read Peter and Jean Medawar’s Philosophical Dictionary of Biology. In the entry for “Illness”, among a lengthy list of ailments, there’s mention of cretinism, which develops, they note, from chronic thyroid deficiency. What I copy here they wrote out before me, out of pity and a curious resentment: “There is, incidentally, an element of charity in describing these last victims as cretins, for ‘cretin’ comes from the French chrétien, meaning Christian. ‘The implication of this word,’ according to lexicographer C.T. Onions, ‘is that these beings are human, although dwarfed and deformed.’” The implication of all utterances: these beings were human, though words we have devised to describe them are dwarfed and deforming. As they are, they are imperfect and whole. This I suppose sounds less like science and more like religion. Its believers are rarely well-spoken.