Dropsy

Caliban: The dropſie drowne this foole,[…]

Your sacred Majesty, he has the dropsy;— We shall find pints of hydatids in’s liver, He has not half an inch of wholesome fat Upon his carious ribs—

The disease under which Addison laboured appears to have been asthma. It became more violent after his retirement from office, and was now accompanied by dropsy.

Like someone moving back in space until the earth appears as a tiny mote of light, he managed to distance himself from the immediate discomfort of pipes with dropsy, defiant plumbing tools, and the overly familiar fiberglass, by musing aloud on the evolutionary history of humans that allowed the two of us to communicate verbally, creating a word picture of the problem and how to fix it.