The Language of Healing: How Literature Shapes our Understanding of Sickness and Health

March 5, 2025

Literature

Nesha Ruther

Writer at Bond & Grace

Healing is one of the most complex and nuanced processes that human beings undergo. Whether recovering from ailments physical, mental, or a combination of both, healing is a singular yet universally shared experience, one every person can relate to.

Investigating the complexities of healing, and how humans have chronicled them, calls us to question all of our preconceived notions. What does it mean to be healthy? What does it mean to be sick? Is the healing process ever truly over, or is it an ongoing journey?

To investigate our understanding of health and healing and perhaps get a better sense of their depth, we’ll take a close look at four stories (two classic and two contemporary) of sickness and health that shed light on how we too can heal and grow.

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic novel, originally published in 1911, captured all the complexities of sickness, health, grief, and redemption in an accessible and whimsical children’s story. Mary Lennox is a selfish, rude, and discontented child who was abandoned by the world long before her parents died in a cholera epidemic. Suddenly orphaned, young Mary is sent to live on her uncle’s large estate in the Yorkshire Moors.

Mary quickly takes to the Moors, befriending a local boy, Dickon, who has a deep appreciation for the land and all its animals. Through Mary and Dickon’s adventures, Burnett posits that gardening, spending time in nature, and exercising are critical to a child’s development. While her theory is sound, the way Burnett positions healing in the novel shows its age. India, where Mary lived with her parents, is endemic of sickness, stagnation, and decay. While the English Moorlands symbolize health, invigoration, and happiness. Burnett was not the first or last writer who described Britain’s colonial project through the lens of bringing health and healing to a supposedly sickly colony.

Running counter to Mary’s journey of emotional health is the physical recovery of her cousin Colin. Colin was believed as a baby to have a hunchback and doctors assumed he would die, leaving him bedridden for much of his life. Only through Mary and Dickon’s intervention does Colin realize he is not actually ill, and through spending time outdoors and interacting with nature he can recover his health and eventually walk.

Colin’s treatment was typical of the Victorian era, where doctors frequently recommended “rest cures,” long periods of bed rest, and little to no stimulation. Burnett made a bold claim by refuting this belief, referencing other historical healing philosophies such as Muscular Christianity, to inform her view that time outdoors, positive thinking, and spiritual strength can heal ailments both mental and physical.

While Colin’s miraculous journey from a wheelchair to walking simply by breathing fresh air and thinking nice thoughts does not quite align with contemporary scholarship about disabilities, it remains an inspiring and charming story. Learning to reframe negative attitudes and stagnant thinking is something many do in therapy today, and exercise is widely accepted as being crucial to mental and physical well-being. Burnett’s philosophy about healing, and how we can achieve it, was decades ahead of its time and remains a powerful and deeply moving story for millions of readers today.

Love In the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

Upon first glance, this classic novel published in 1985 by Nobel Prize Winner Gabriel García Márquez, appears to be a very traditional love story: protagonists Florentino and Fermina fall in love in their youth, but the pressures of the world keep them apart. The novel charts their separate lives until they are finally able to return to each other in their old age.

Simultaneously, however, the novel offers a much more nuanced view, equating romantic obsessions to sickness. Spanning the decades between the 1880s and the 1930s in an unnamed city in Colombia, the threat of infection is pervasive throughout the story and is baked into the very environment. Márquez describes “steamy and sleepy streets, rat-infested sewers, old slave quarters, decaying colonial architecture, and multifarious inhabitants.” Márquez argues that in the same way that cholera is dangerous and highly contagious, so too is romantic obsession.

While Fermina succumbs to the pressure of her father and marries the wealthy doctor Juvenal Urbino, Florentino remains emotionally devoted to her. He pines after her throughout their years apart, while also having hundreds of affairs with other women, who he moves through and discards like a violent illness. Márquez’s writing is so exquisite that it is easy to see Florentino’s devotion as romantic and noble, but in reality, he is the disease. When he and Fermina are finally reunited, he lies and says that he has never been with anyone but her. His passion is a sickness that he is unable to recover from.

Perhaps the true love story of the novel is actually between Fermina and Dr. Urbino. Although she initially dislikes him and marries him for pragmatic reasons, they build a long-lasting and meaningful relationship. Florentino and Dr. Urbino are fascinating parallels to one another, causing us to investigate our conceptions of love, happiness, and health. Dr. Urbino is the logic and reason to Florentino’s unbridled passion. While Florentino spreads the novel’s metaphoric disease, Dr. Urbino is committed to stopping the literal spread of cholera and bringing “order and progress” to the Colombian health system. Florentino claims to be devoted to Fermina while lying about the many women he has been with. Dr. Urbino is at one point unfaithful to his wife, but he confesses and they are able to move forward. Florentino is obsessed with a romanticized ideal, while Dr. Urbino experiences the realities and challenges of married life with Fermina.

Márquez argues that Florentino is sick and contagious. Unable to recover from his unrealistic ideals, he harms himself and others. In the end, it is Fermina and Urbino’s relationship that is both physically and emotionally healing, because they are able to build a real love rather than an imagined one.

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

Michelle Zauner, lead singer of the popular indie rock band Japanese Breakfast, was 25 when she received the devastating news that her mother had terminal pancreatic cancer. For Zauner, who grew up in rural Oregon the only child of a South Korean mother and white father, her mother’s death severed her connection to her Korean heritage.

If Burnett positioned nature as the driving force for health, for Zauner it is food. Korean cooking was how her mother showed love in a relationship often fraught with generational and cultural divides. It was how Zauner overcame the language barrier she faced during summers spent with her extended family in Seoul. When her mother became ill, learning Korean recipes was how Zauner cared for her and returned all those decades of love.

In this dazzling memoir, Zauner positions food as a vehicle for interpersonal connection, a way to recover cultural meaning, and a vital tool in maneuvering profound grief. H Mart, the Korean grocery store chain, becomes “the bridge that guides me away from the memories that haunt me, of chemo head and skeletal bodies and logging milligrams of hydrocodone.”

In the gorgeous essay “Kimchi Fridge” which uses the fermentation of cabbage to create kimchi as a metaphor for healing, Zauner states: “The memories I had stored, I could not let fester. Could not let trauma infiltrate and spread, to spoil and render them useless. They were moments to be tended. The culture we shared was active, effervescent in my gut and in my genes and I had to seize it, foster it so it did not die in me. So that I could pass it on someday.”

While her mother would never heal from cancer, Zauner, through her heritage, her cooking, and the memories of her mother, was able to heal from a devastating loss. Grief was transformed from a debilitating pain to a tender and precious reminder of the love between mother and daughter.

The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki

When 15-year-old Benny Oh’s father dies in a sudden and tragic accident, he begins to hear the voices of inanimate objects. Written down, this premise seems rather whimsical and lighthearted, but Ozeki takes it seriously. Fractured by grief and overwhelmed by his increasingly noisy world, Benny struggles to make it through days where he is berated by blinds and pleaded to by pencils. When Benny is urged by a pair of scissors to stab his teacher, he instead stabs himself in the leg, leading to a brief stint in a psychiatric hospital.

Even after his release, Benny’s condition is made worse by the fact that his mother Annabelle is a hoarder. Annabelle works as a “clipper,” spending her days sorting through newsprint that is delivered in large piles to her house. Struggling with her grief and the stress of her increasingly obsolete job, Annabelle turns to shopping to ease her sadness and anxiety, in doing so making the house nearly uninhabitable for her sensitive son.

As Annabelle spirals, Benny desperately seeks connection, finding it amid a homeless poet and a girl who goes by The Aleph. The novel is also partly narrated by a book itself, The Book of Form and Emptiness, that tells the story of Benny’s life, occasionally including details that Benny himself finds objectionable. Ozeki uses the surreality of the novel to capture the agonies of mental illness and the way grief turns life on its head, treating each eccentric character and unbelievable event with tenderness and concern.

Ozeki herself is a Zen Buddhist priest, and her philosophies are translated beautifully into fiction. Ozeki posits that it is connection—literary and otherwise—that ultimately leads us out of the pits of grief. It is through his new friends and the community at his local library that Benny is able to get the help he needs. A book Annabelle buys on a whim about the power of decluttering leads her, slowly and often painfully, to changing her life. Through the power of their community and the guiding light of literature, Annabelle and Benny are able to reconnect and heal from their loss.

However you achieve health: through a happy relationship, time spent in nature, cooking with loved ones, or reading a life-changing book, we hope these stories inspire you to reexamine notions of sickness and health and strive towards the latter in all aspects of life.

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