The hospital room was as cold as dead skin, the hallway crowded with lost souls and reeking of illness.

Psychological theories of illness are a powerful means of placing the blame on the ill. Patients who are instructed that they have, unwittingly, caused their disease are also being made to feel that they have...

… but as with so may diagnoses it is, in the end, the symptoms that matter, not the cause, because this is what being alive means, this is what being a person means, to be...

There is such beauty in the fight to live. We must all find the courage to go on.

There’s a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.

We have formed a sick little friendship over the past year

The cure for our modern maladies is dirt under the fingernails and the feel of thick grass between the toes. The cure for our listlessness is to be out within the invigorating wind. The cure...

Poverty and sickness have this miraculous power of completely changing one’s priorities; one’s sentimental and psychological values go out the window.

Be not sick too late, nor well too soon

Stopping a war; that is, stopping actual military combat, is not stopping a war in all its factors. During continuous hard strain a human mind can hold up; and it is truly amazing how much...

You need to spend time crawling alone through shadows to truly appreciate what it is to stand in the sun.

Seeing modern health care from the other side, I can say that it is clearly not set up for the patient. It is frequently a poor arrangement for doctors as well, but that does not...

Ik rende naar de badkamer en kotste alles er boven de wasbak weer uit.Dat luchtte op. Ik spoelde mijn mond en strompelde terug naar het bed.Even later hoorde ik mijn vader roepen: ‘Shit, Max, shít!...

I’m a bad traveller because I suffer from travel sickness.

Those of us who have the luck to enjoy good health forget about this vast parallel universe of the unwell-their daily miseries, their banal ordeals. Only when you cross that frontier into the world of...