Picture medicine in the year 1790. If you fell ill, a doctor came and made it worse. They opened your veins and bled you, sometimes by the pint, until you fainted, believing the illness would drain out with the blood. They dosed you with mercury until your teeth loosened and your gums bled, and called the poisoning a cure. They blistered your skin on purpose. They purged you until you were hollow. George Washington, the most powerful man in America, died in 1799 partly becaus

There is a single belief so old and so widespread that it appears in nearly every culture humanity has ever produced, in societies that never met and never shared a word. The conviction that a look can harm you. The evil eye. The idea that a glance, especially one born of envy, can carry something across the air and into the person it lands on, souring their luck, sickening their child, cracking their fortune. Not a spoken curse. Just a look, covetous and lingering, from some