The meaning of illness

I've finally started reading the brilliant Patti Smith autobiography Just Kids, about her early life with Robert Mapplethorpe (thank you Miss Natalie, for this wonderful gift).
She begins by writing about her childhood in the 1940s and 50s, growing up in Pennsylvania with her loving and supportive but poor family. Creative and spirited from a young age, she decides to change the Lord's prayer she recites every night to make it more her own (wisely removing the "if I should die before I wake" line). This is what she writes about this experience:
"It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination. This process was especially magnified within the fevers of influenza, measles, chicken pox, and mumps. I had them all and with each I was privileged with a new sense of awareness."
Later, when Patti and Robert are living in New York, Patti has to nurse Robert through a desperate fever - he has trenchmouth and gonorrhea, among other things.
"I know how to take care of him. I was good at tending the sick, bringing one out of fever, for I had learned that from my mother."
The first thing that strikes me with these insights is how much we have lost by not allowing our children to experience illness in a natural way.
Not only are well-managed illnesses important for physical growth and experience, they also offer growth for the mind and spirit.
We prescribe pharmaceutical drugs for so many 'conditions' these days they are now making them up (can't be bothered having sex? you have hypoactive sexual desire disorder; ask too many questions? You have oppositional defiant disorder). The number of people whose abilities and imagination are stifled and dulled by their prescriptions would no doubt boggle anyone's mind.
The effect of all this is that we have lost the knowledge and confidence to care for our bodies and those of our children. The result? We hand them over to others. In the same way we hand over a shoebox full of receipts to our accountant at the end of the year and cross our fingers the tax bill won't be too big. We wait until something goes wrong with our bodies, then hand them over to the 'professionals' and cross our fingers they will fix them.
Why? Because we're scared and unarmed. It requires a lot of confidence and knowledge to take responsibility for anything in life, whether it's where you choose to invest your money, or the health of your children.
Knowledge truly is power. I for one am so grateful to have a well-armed mother and sister to hand down and swap information with. When Roman got sick last Saturday, mum immediately made a lemon compress before heading out for dinner. It may have seemed a casual and normal gesture for her, but it was life-affirming for me, and gave me the confidence to care for my boy. This is inherited knowledge I will be able to pass down to my children when they have children.
Forearmed is forewarned and, when it comes to health, prevention and a robust immune system are the building blocks. We are lucky in New Zealand that some, but not all, of us have access to healthy food, sanitation and heating.
Wouldn't it be great if the billions spent on unnecessary pharmaceuticals were instead spent on getting everyone's houses warm and dry, teaching people how to grow their own cheap and healthy food and educating everyone on confident health self-management?
Hospitals would be quiet but.