>>10834585>I refuse to believe someone as smart as Von Neumann couldn't at least figure out a way to delay his cancer if his entire life depended on it.It was pancreatic cancer. That's about as bad as it gets in terms of how quickly it will kill you. Maybe if he got into medicine earlier in life he could've figured out how to revolutionize the field of oncology, but even the most brilliant geniuses of all time aren't anyone I would bet money on picking up medicine, mastering it, and exceeding the existing domain experts in under two years (time of his diagnosis to time of death), especially not if the person who needed to do all this was also wasting away and in horrible pain and incapacitation from literally dying during that year and change.
Also if it were a hoax I would expect his attitude towards dying to be more like Einstein's where he was accepting of it and not worried (why worry if you knew it wasn't really happening?). Instead everyone who knew him reported he was terrified of dying. Pretty sad actually to think about someone dying of something that hardcore and inexorable like pancreatic cancer in such a rapid but still drawn out enough to dwell on period of time who was horribly disturbed by it to the very end.
I hope I end up more like Einstein who even refused treatment on the basis that it would be in bad taste to prolong the inevitable. Being able to relax and die peacefully is priceless.
