Everyone gets sick." That was the opening somber sentence of a book I wrote a decade ago about disease, illness, and patienthood in premodern South Asia. 1 The Sanskrit texts I studied in the book tell us that all people endure disease; they classify each disease according to origin, symptoms, and probability of cure; and they propose remedies for treatment. There is little discussion in the literature about the experience of disease, however. That is, we do not get a thoroughgoing account of the knotty bio-social-moral-economic-legal processes of disease, or what's often labeled "illness" in medical humanities scholarship, to remind us that a disease is not a static thing isolable from the body and person who bears it. The human condition of patienthood-what it means and feels like to be a Sanskrit rogin, "diseased one"-is usually absent, at best unformulated, in the Sanskrit medical literature, even if a generic body is an ever-present canvas upon which disease is described as coursing, interrupting health, and sometimes causing death.The existential breadth of illness is rarely captured in medical texts and clinical jargon, since both are pitched by and for physicians and scientists. Cheryl Mattingly coined the phrase "chart talk" to highlight the ways that biomedical discourse frequently omits or minimizes the lived experiences of people saddled with disease. 2 South Asia's premodern (mostly Sanskrit) medical literature by and large looks like chart talk. It offers few insights into the nature of illness and patienthood. But if the Sanskrit medical texts depict diseases as morbid physical conditions, shorn of the multilayered experience of illness, students and scholars of South Asian literatures know well that concerns of dis-ease as personal and social unrest, inconvenience, longing, and grievance extend across literary cultures other than medicine.In South Asian devotional poetry, comedic and tragic drama, and philosophy, for example, expressions of the breadth of dis-ease as confrontations, struggles, and adjustments to mental, emotional, and physical impediments, letdowns, and pains in everyday life are commonplace. Reading across all these literatures helps us understand what it means to be diseased/dis-eased, to realize that everyone gets sick, that patienthood is common. To experience disease/dis-ease is not extraordinary, even if it feels that way sometimes because of the intensely individual nature of illness. Many premodern literatures from South Asia explain this basic feature of the human condition, each in its own genre-specific way, with sublimely lilting poetry, intricately complex verse and, as in some of the medical literature, painstaking prose. With such an array of presentations, to what extent are we able to know the nature of disease as a real thing that people have and endure when we read these timeworn writings from South Asia? While I have been writing this essay, nearly every person everywhere in the world has been experiencing and responding to a daily reality saturated by a letha...