Benjamin Franklin: A Private Life

1790, Philadelphia

The body has turned treacherous in ways I would once have found comic in another man and now cannot laugh at in myself. My hands do not always hold steady, the bladder stone reminds me of its existence with admirable persistence, and every physician who attends me has the same polite expression by which learned men confess they can do very little. The room is warm, though I feel cold in the extremities. Papers lie in ordered heaps near the bed, letters from Europe, notes from Congress, petitions, proofs, and those small requests for recollection by which a man is turned into a public convenience before he is fully dead. Philadelphia still bustles outside, carts, bells, winter mud, arguments in good coats. In here there is mostly paper, pain, and the smell of wax and old linen. They have begun making me agreeable in retrospect. That is intolerable. I have been useful often enough. I do not intend to be reduced to harmlessness as well.