Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change
that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the
undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts
of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light, what
precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of
temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us
in the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel
the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to
find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we
have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist's arm chair and
confuse his 'Rinse the mouth--rinse the mouth' with the greeting of the
Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us--when we think of
this and infinitely more, as we are so frequently forced to think of it,
it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with
love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.
-- Virginia Woolf. "On Being Ill" The New Criterion
(January 1926).