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Ram Dass says, "If I can’t stop thinking, maybe I can just let my thoughts go by without getting all caught up in them. Feel the breeze on your face or your neck? See how it’s going by? You’re not all hung up with it. You don’t have to see where each breeze goes. You don’t have to look quickly to see if it hit those trees over there. It’s breezes, and they’re just going by. Make your thoughts like those breezes, those little breezes…just going by."
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Doctors in Elizabethan England did what they could for their patients, but they lacked for real medical knowledge: They had little chance of deducing what was actually making a person sick. Luck almost certainly played as important a role as the work of the physician. Some patients were treated and got better—but perhaps they would have recovered just as quickly (or even more quickly) with no treatment. By the same token, some patients got steadily worse, and, in spite of treatment, they eventually died—but very likely they would have died even if no treatment had been given (and just the fact that some treatment was offered may well have brought comfort). Illnesses were not categorized in a rigorous way, and, worse, the symptoms themselves were often conflated with the disease. For example, fever is today recognized as a symptom common to many diseases; but in Shakespeare’s day it was seen as an illness in itself. As Olsen notes, “No wonder that any one type of treatment, when applied to all fevers of whatever origin, usually failed to work.” Diseases like tuberculosis, influenza, dysentery, smallpox, malaria, and syphilis were killers, while scurvy was particularly common among sailors. (The queen herself nearly died from smallpox in 1562, two years before Shakespeare’s birth.) And of course there was the plague; because of its unpredictability, it was even more feared than the others.
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