Marion Renault

There was the home health attendant who sucked her thumb before touching household items. And the one who brought her unvaccinated 4-year-old into the apartment where Mary and her immunocompromised husband live, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And the one who came by after her day shift at a nursing home.Many of the aides who circulated through Mary’s household were vaccine-hesitant or outright anti-vax; many wore their mask improperly while in the apartment, she told me.

Lindsey Kaczmarek gets called an ambulance driver more often than she gets called a paramedic. “That’s absolutely not what I do,” she told me. What she does do is show up when someone needs medical help, figure out what’s wrong with them, and do whatever she can to help them survive the trip to the hospital—in her case, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

In its larval stage, Lucilia sericata looks unassuming enough. Beige and millimeters long, a bottle-fly grub may lack good looks, but it contains a sophisticated set of tools for eating dead and dying human flesh. The maggots ooze digestive enzymes and antimicrobials to dissolve decaying tissue and to kill off any unwanted bacteria or pathogens.

A young Denise Maso stands on the balcony of an apartment in Le Pont-de-Claix, France, where she spent most of her adult life. (Courtesy of Marion Renault)On her first night home from the hospital, between bouts of writhing in pain, my grandmother stopped to ask me, over and over, “Qu’est-ce que j’ai fait?”: “What did I do?”My grandmother, Denise, is 82 and in the late stages of Alzheimer’s disease, which means she can no longer form new memories.

At the posthumous retrial of Joan of Arc in 1455, two decades after she was burned at the stake as a witch and a heretic, she was declared an innocent martyr. During the trial, a personal valet offered evidence of Joan of Arc’s piety and purity during her 19 years on Earth: “She never suffered from the secret illness of women.” As far as the people closest to her knew, he claimed, she never got her period.