The experience of illness can be isolating and alienating. Serious and chronic illness can make one feel unwelcome in one’s own body and out of place in a world of otherwise healthy people. The theme of illness as alienation is explored in Susan Sontag’s 1978 essay “Illness as Metaphor.” Sontag, who at the time was undergoing treatment for breast cancer, compares illness to a second citizenship—one that we must all take up at some point in our lives:
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 only 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.
This image of illness as a second and inferior citizenship draws attention to how illness can place a barrier between the self and the world. Even with excellent medical care, one can still feel fundamentally alone and unsupported.
How might we ameliorate the exile of illness? Modern medicine has been spectacularly successful in providing treatments for some of the most aggressive and debilitating forms of disease. But many still struggle to cope with the existential dimensions of the experience of disease or injury.
Hospitality—which can mean the literal reception of guests but has also been described as authentic human connection—is an undervalued remedy for the alienation of illness.
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[READ MORE: https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-hostility-of-illness-and-the-therapeutic-importance-of-hospitality/]