Lucius Annaeus Seneca, in his Epistulae morales ad Lucilium—especially Letter 54—portrays asthma not only as a bodily ailment but as a genuine "exercise in death" (meditatio mortis). The Stoic philosopher describes the asthmatic crisis as suspirium: a breath that falters, leaving the body in an anguished suspension. For Seneca, the loss of breath was the most concrete manifestation of human frailty: "Everything that must happen, happens at the moment when the breath fails." I
