Foot-and-Mouth Disease in Humans

Foot-and-mouth disease in humans is extremely rare. So rare that many physicians go through an entire career without seeing a single case. It is an animal disease — and when it strikes a human, it manifests as blisters on the mouth, hands, and feet, as painful inflammations at the three places with which you speak, grasp, and walk. At the three tools of your connection to the world.

Medically, the condition in humans is usually mild and heals on its own. But the psychosomatic perspective asks a different question: Why does your system react to a pathogen that almost exclusively affects animals? What has shifted in your inner equilibrium, making you susceptible to something that normally does not touch humans? And why precisely there — at the mouth, the hands, the feet?