Take “Morgellons Disease,” a psychosomatic belief that you have wires growing in your body, which causes sufferers to pick at their skin to the point of creating suppurating wounds. Morgellons emerged in the 2000s, but the name refers to a 17th-century case-report of a patient who suffered from a similar delusion:

Nitpick but this is unusually sloppy for Doctorow. 1) People with Morgellon’s don’t believe they have wires growing out of sores, but fibres (which upon examination turn out to be cotton for clothes). 2) The original Morgellons is a putative children’s disease «wherein they critically break out with harsh Hairs on their Backs, which takes off the Unquiet Symptomes of the Disease, and delivers them from Coughs and Convulsions.» Which is quite different from the modern condition, whose sufferers have skin sores anywhere in the body with fibrous material looking like lint, dandelion fluff etc., and not particularly associated with convulsions. And 3) The association between the two was made by Miriam Leitao, a mother who believes her son suffers from the disease, and has gone to countless doctors and media trying to prove it’s real. So it’s an attempt to legitimise the postulated disease by cherry-picking something “historical” that vaguely resembles it.