From the ankle that throbs as if it had been twisted, to the head that feels as if it had been placed in a bench vise, the body is a ladder whose rungs are aches and pains. The knee that the doctor said could be treated either by an operation (expensive, long recovery, low odds of success) or by nightly massage with a child’s toy, a hard rubber ball; the stomach that acts up as often after not ordering the kung pao chicken as after ordering it; the chest that feels, hard to say, constricted ( — What’s it like? — My heart is beating fast — That sounds like anxiety — Yes, I’m anxious): all remind us that we aren’t some tech nerd’s vision of a simulation but flesh and blood. Myriad pleasures remind us of that too, but they do not make you go someplace to get something to fix whatever it is that ails you.

A sick Greek had to go to a temple dedicated to Asclepius, half-human son of Apollo who was said to be able to raise the dead. A sick city-dweller can step outside his door. The ground floor of the apartment building is given over to stores — nail salon, dry cleaner, diner, supermarket. The last, even in its compact urban form one of those Aladdin’s caves that made Khrushchev weep, has a little side shelf by the cash registers of aspirins and bismuths and other over-the-counter remedies. For not much more effort than getting your mail in the mail room or chatting with the doorman, you can find the equivalent of what a 19th-century apothecary peddler would have brought on muleback over the mountains.

Across the street and two blocks down is an actual drugstore. Drugstores have expanded their stock of late. You can buy Kleenex and toilet paper, snack food up to boxed oven-ready pizzas, birthday cards and seasonal cards (turkeys done, Santas at bat), aisles and aisles worth of cosmetics, even in this particular store newspapers (it is the last place in the city I know of that offers the civil-service weekly). Justifying its name, it also offers health products, organized by function — women’s wellness, cold cough flu, vitamins and supplements, gadgets (temperature and blood-pressure takers). Half of these are locked up to frustrate thieves, half take their chances.

At the back of the store is the pharmacy. The staff, endlessly patient, is like the new Republican Party: Filipino, black, Russian (Soviet and post-Soviet Jews transliterate their surnames slightly differently from the immigrants who fled the tsar). The customers picking up prescriptions come in all sizes and ages. When you make an appointment to get a Covid vaccine, until Bobby Jr. bans it, you sit on flimsy plastic chairs and wait and wait and wait.

And across the street from the drugstore is that new half-breed, between self-care and the hospital, the walk-in clinic. Asclepius was begot by Apollo on Coronis. What produced the walk-in clinic, whether it was some change in insurance or the overwhelming of emergency rooms, I do not know. The place we use is clean, quiet, pretty quick. The staff is young, but then so many are young these days. For something simple they will send an order to the drugstore across the street. For something worse they will tell you to go to your doctor, or to the hospital. No cure-alls, but a degree of certainty, which is the first step in a cure.

And in our neighborhood all this activity, trivial and easy as it is, is accompanied by the wail of sirens: EMS vehicle sirens, for there are real hospitals nearby, and their boxy sickness taxis roar up and down the avenue, with siren barks or long sine-curve-shaped wails, day and night. My wife, who has ears like a dog, suffers as they pass, then always wishes the sufferers within well.

What about those old days, when the peddler with his stock appeared twice a year, and in between you relied on the roots that the red man had told you about? Were we sturdier, more self-reliant? Most of us, maybe; the rest were dead, dead before the time of ordinary life expectancy, because feces got in the well water, or the poison plant the cows ate got in the milk, or the mosquito injected something not just annoying but fatal. We’ll take our medicine.