"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...it
becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among
the prime themes of literature. Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to
influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia, lyrics to toothache. But no; ... literature
does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass
through which the soul looks straight and clear."
-On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf
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