quotations about illness
Illness is the human response to disease. It refers to the person's subjective experience of how they feel but does not assume any underlying pathology. Illness can be either organic or psychological. A person can have a disease but not be ill. For example, a girl with epilepsy has a disease, but if she is not having seizures and the epilepsy is asymptomatic she is not ill. A person with a psychosomatic disorder, on the other hand, is ill but does not necessarily have a disease.
SUZANNE O'SULLIVAN
Is It All In Your Head?
As the sick man does not skip and leap around, his wishes do so all the more.
ERNST BLOCH
The Principle of Hope
This sickness doth infect
The very life-blood of our enterprise.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Henry IV, Part I
So the sick man has the feeling not that he lacks something but that he has too much of something. His discomfort, as something which is hanging around him and superfluous, has to go; pain is proud flesh. He dreams of the body which knows how to keep comfortably quiet again.
ERNST BLOCH
The Principle of Hope
Prevention is better than cure.
ERASMUS
Adagia
So much in a relationship changes when a partner is seriously ill, helpless yet blameless, and indefatigably needy.
DIANE ACKERMAN
One Hundred Names for Love
Disease is the retribution of outraged Nature.
HOSEA BALLOU
Edge-Tools of Speech
Being ill is not exactly conducive to having peace. You are shuttled from one doctor to another. Your days are filled with managing medicines, scheduling appointments, and haggling with insurance companies. Your mind is exploding with questions about what will happen and doubts about what to do next. You are bombarded by the advice and ideas of family and friends, each of whom has his own idea of what is wrong with you and how to treat it.
PEGGY HOLT
Healing for the Heart: Encouragement and Truth for the Chronically Ill
The amount of sympathy you get from having an illness is paid out like a Ponzi scheme and psychiatric disorders are all the way at the bottom.
NENIA CAMPBELL
Tantalized
Each patient carries his own doctor inside him.
NORMAN COUSINS
Anatomy of an Illness
Avoid a remedy that is worse than the disease.
AESOP
"The Hawk, Aesop's Fables
A long disease seems to be a halting place between life and death, that death itself may be a comfort to those who die and to those who are left behind.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Mankind", Les Caractères
There is a certain solipsism to serious illness which claims all of one's attention as certainly as an astronomical black hole seizes anything unlucky enough to fall within its critical radius.
DAN SIMMONS
The Fall of Hyperion
Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.
SUSAN SONTAG
Illness as Metaphor
Infirmity doth still neglect all office
Whereto our health is bound; we are not ourselves
When nature, being oppressed, commands the mind
To suffer with the body.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King Lear
For we are not all equally afflicted with the same disease or all in need of the same severe cure. This is the reason why we see different persons disciplined with different crosses. The heavenly Physician takes care of the well-being of all his patients; he gives some a milder medicine and purifies others by more shocking treatments, but he omits no one; for the whole world, without exception, is ill.
JOHN CALVIN
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life
But when ill indeed,
E'en dismissing the doctor don't always succeed.
GEORGE COLMAN THE YOUNGER
Broad Grins, Lodgings for Single Gentlemen
Being ill is no straightforward matter. We have already seen the moral imperative that accompanies health and the requirement for individuals to account for any lapses from health. Moreover, not just any account is likely to be accepted by professionals, or possibly by other people. Describing ill-health that is vouched by external evidence, such as injury or physical symptoms, is one thing; to claim ill-health based upon factors that are known or knowable only to the person making the claim is quite another. People making claims of ill-health have an interest in having their claims accepted: any claims of ill-health are immediately open to potential challenge on grounds of the stake of the maker of the claim. Accounts of illness that are based solely or primarily upon subjective experience will therefore be difficult to sustain.
ANDREW MCKINLAY & CHRIS MCVITTIE
Social Psychology and Discourse
"Health" and "illness," "being well" and "being ill" are clearly evaluative expressions in more than one way. It is desirable, other things being equal, to be well and undesirable (with the same proviso) to be ill; but it is desirable/undesirable for a different reason from being, say, rich or poor, lucky or unlucky. Being rich is desirable for those who prefer to be rich. Being ill may be thought to be undeisrable even for someone who may prefer to be so -- such a preference may be regarded as itself undesirable. In this respect, health and illness are more like moral virtue and vice than they are like wealth and poverty. However, they are not exactly like virtue and vice. We do not praise the person who is healthy or condemn the person who is ill because we regard a person's state of health as ultimately beyond that person's conscious control. We can of course attempt to keep ourselves healthy by taking exercise, eating a proper diet, avoiding excess, and so on; in the end, all these efforts may be frustrated by infections, accidental injuries, the working of our genes, or the inevitable consequences of aging.
ERIC MATTHEWS
"Personal Identity and Mental Health", Personhood and Health Care
For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.
MARCEL PROUST
"The Guermantes Way," Remembrance of Things Past