Kevin

“[T]he Christian reverence due to suffering—was simply gammon, resting as it did on a misconception, on mistaken sympathy, on erroneous psychology. The pity the well person felt for the sick—a pity that almost amounted to awe, because the well person could not imagine how he himself could possibly bear such suffering—was very greatly exaggerated. The sick person had no real right to it. It was, in fact, the result of an error in thinking, a sort of hallucination; in that the well man attributed to the sick his own emotional equipment, and imagined that the sick man was, as it were, a well man who had to bear the agonies of a sick one—than which nothing was further from the truth. For the sick man was—precisely that, a sick man: with the nature and modified reactions of his state. Illness so adjusted its man that it and he could come to terms; there were sensory appeasements, short circuits, a merciful narcosis; nature came to the rescue with measures of spiritual and moral adaptation and relief, which the sound person naïvely failed to take into account.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain