Susan Sontag, understood this when she said in Illness as a Metaphor that "any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. Often because it overwhelms us." Because in an age in which we are all focused on health, it is often the reality of sickness that changes our world and our world view.
This was the experience of journalist and author Nora Gallagher, as she traveled into the nation of helath care, only to hit landfall at the Mayo Clinic. She tells her story in The Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic.
My conversation with Nora Gallagher: