Here's another Flannery bit from yesterday: <a href="https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/01/18/stifle/" rel="nofollow">https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/01/18/stifle/</a>. Frivolous, but amusing. She was a great letter writer.
<i>her publisher, Harcourt, Brace, had requested a picture for the back of the book jacket. “They were all bad,” O’Connor wrote to the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald and his wife, Sally. “The one I sent looked as if I had just bitten my grandmother and that this was one of my few pleasures, but the rest were worse.”</i><p>It is a good read. I can identify with a lot of it.
Steven Sparrow's essays[1] made Ms O'Connor's short stories more accessible to me<p>[1] <a href="http://flanneryoconnor.com/on.html" rel="nofollow">http://flanneryoconnor.com/on.html</a>
It's possible that the author suffered from what might be called "vegetable deficiency" disease.<p>See for example this MD who cured her Lupus with better nutrition:
<a href="https://www.forksoverknives.com/stroke-doctor-reversed-lupus-plant-based-diet/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forksoverknives.com/stroke-doctor-reversed-lupus...</a><p>Or this other MD who cured her MS with better nutrition: <a href="https://terrywahls.com/" rel="nofollow">https://terrywahls.com/</a><p>See also for general background: <a href="http://media.wholefoodsmarket.com/news/the-whole-foods-diet" rel="nofollow">http://media.wholefoodsmarket.com/news/the-whole-foods-diet</a><p>Vitamin D deficiency is also common. But obviously there might be other deficiencies (or in a very rare case some genetic disorder).<p>Or there can be an undiagnosed chronic infections. Here is an MD who cured himself of chronic Lyme with better nutrition plus herbs plus antibiotics: <a href="http://www.lymebook.com/lyme-disease-solution" rel="nofollow">http://www.lymebook.com/lyme-disease-solution</a><p>Bottom line: mainstream medicine has only become good so far at treating the first two of these three major health situations:<p>* accidental trauma (based on learning from US battlefield experience in surgery)<p>* acute infectious disease (mostly by quarantine, sanitation, and increasingly-less-effective antibiotics -- until maybe phage therapy becomes common someday)<p>* chronic disease like autoimmune disorders, cardiovascular disease, or cancer (usually caused by the Standard American Diet, but maybe also interacting with some other factors including exposure to toxins etc.)<p>All that said, part of healing is mental or spiritual -- so reading good stories can indeed help with that in a variety of ways.