Well "broken heart" is a metaphor isn't it.
In victorian times they used to "go into a decline". But doctors then had to deal with so much TB and that is a weird illness - people can have a latent case, walled up in a corner of their lungs for years and then a shock to the system unbalances the immune system and they developed active disease.
I believe that everyday stress is over used as a reason for illness though. Spent a long time , a very long time, writing a chapter on this when I was writing the great work. Sometime stress (and mental attitude maybe) can improve the immune system. You know the one where you really can't afford to get ill?
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