Our minds might pretend to be sovereign and to see our bodies as they really are, but the truth is that we are all deluded, and never more so than when in denial about this or that shape-shifting malady.
It goes by many names, but around here they call it "the malady of the sugar cane".
I have travelled to El Salvador to investigate the mystery of the malady.
Mr Rumsfeld, they whisper, is a classic victim of "sun-king syndrome"—a near universal malady among bosses of all sorts that leads them to overestimate their own abilities and underestimate everybody else's.The diplomatic charge is, to put it politely, hard to rebut.
This malady affects pilots more acutely than standard jet lag, because they rarely stay in one place long enough to switch from their home time.
The evidence presented in "Gout: The Patrician Malady" bears out the authors' claim that gout is a worthwhile subject for serious investigation, yielding all manner of social, cultural and biographical insights.
It's not clear whether Mr Rohde or many journalists would take the same view, but Mr Danziger believes that it is, at any rate, symptomatic of an institutional malady, wherein journalists falsely believe themselves to be "above the shared obligations of citizenship".
Many scholars trace the malady back a century when police began to take a cut from the wildly popular illegal lottery called the jogo de bicho.
Accordingly, potential customers are expected to suffer from what the industry has come to call "range anxiety .This is no idle malady, as test-driving some of the first electric cars and prototypes reveals.
Congo's transitional government has conspicuously failed to treat the malady that makes the country so war-prone: corruption.The country first fell apart because its rulers stole the cement.
But the struggle was merely one symptom of a far deeper malady in modern Turkey that it will take more than Mr Ocalan's conversion to cure.
