The water treatment was new, now, and Tom’s low condition was a windfall to her (Aunt Polly). She had him out at daylight every morning, stood him up in the woodshed and drowned him with a deluge of cold water; then she scrubbed him down with a towel like a file, and so brought him […]
Illness Quotes
My privy and well drain into each other After the custom of Christendie… Fevers and fluxes are wasting my mother. Why has the Lord afflicted me? The Saints are helpless for all I offer – So are the clergy I used to fee. Henceforward I keep my cash in my coffer, Because the Lord has […]
Sickness, like sex, demands a private room, or at the very least, a discreet curtain around the ward bed.
How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man’s self to himself!
The sick soon come to understand that they live in a different world from that of the well and that the two cannot communicate.
A disease and its treatment can be a series of humiliations, a chisel for humility.
The difficulty with becoming a patient is that as soon as you get horizontal, part of your being yearns, not for a doctor, but for a medicine man.
I cannot believe that my illness is natural. I suspect Satan, and therefore I am the more inclined to take it lightly.
A man’s illness is his private territory and, no matter how much he loves you and how close you are, you stay an outsider. You are healthy.
Most illnesses tend to kill some people and to spare others, “and if you are one of the lucky ones and have also had at hand a steady knowledgeable doctor, you become convinced that the doctor saved you.” (The quote is from Lewis Thomas.) It is just this element of post hoc, propter hoc, I […]
