healing
Each patient carries his own doctor inside him. They come to us not knowing that truth. We are at our best when we give the doctor who resides within each patient a chance to go to work.
quoted by Norman Cousins in Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), paperback ed., 78.
Always the purpose of treatment is only to restore nature’s balance against disease. There is no recovery unless it comes from the force and fiber of one’s own tissues. The physician’s role is to be the cornerman—stitch up the lacerations, apply the soothing balm, encourage the use of the fighter’s specific abilities, say all the right things—to encourage the flagging strength of the real combatant, the pummeled body. As doctors, we do our best when we remove the obstacles to healing and encourage organs and cells to use their own nature-given power to overcome.
The Wisdom of the Body (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 278.
I seem slowly to be getting over what I imagined was the matter with me.
February 23, 1932 letter to Louis Untermeyer from Amherst, Massachusetts, in The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), 220.
Healing is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.
“The Art of Healing,” in Collected Poems ed. by Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 2007), 836.