Melancholia... painted in the nineteenth century by the French artist "Géricault" when he visited the asylum of the insane, in an era when misery and death were their appointed lot.

Leprosy: the disease men feared and fled from — but the artist "Hans Holbein" pierced the veil of fear in his painting "The Young Leper."

The swoon: a statue of Saint Teresa... made by the Italian artist "Bernini" as far back as 1650... he carved it at the request of the Church. It represents one of the swooning states experienced by the mystics.

"Acromegaly," or chronic enlargement. The disease was not discovered until 1886, yet the evidence of it existed as early as the fifteenth century, in the painting "The Old Woman" by Quentin Matsys; and medicine has arrived at its treatment by means of surgery and X-rays.

Paralysis: a fifteenth-century painting by the artist "Bruegel," which by itself proved to the scientists that paralysis was known in the Middle Ages and is not one of the novelties of this age...