ah hum. dealing with viruses and the stuff of burroughs' cut-up writings gets me in the mood for some good cendrars. figure i'd share a bit with you.
Diseases are. We do not make or unmake them at will. We are not their masters. They make us, they form us. They may even have created us. They belong to this state of activity which we call life. They may be its main activity. They are one of the many manifestations of universal matter. They may be the principal manifestation of that matter which we will never be able to study except through the phenomena of relationships and analogies. Diseases are a transitory, intermediary, future state of health. It may be that they are health itself.
...
Epidemics, and even more diseases of the will or collective neuroses, mark off the different epochs of human evolution, just as tellurian cataclysms mark the history of our planet. In all this lies an elementary, complicated chemistry which has not yet been studied.
Learned and all as they are, the doctors of today are not physicians. They are drifting farther and farther from the study and observation of nature. They have forgotten that science must remain a kind of edification which is subject to the limitations of our spiritual antennae.
CS
Thanks. It puts the thought in my head again about G. Flaubert as being perhaps the only real doctor in his family.
ReplyDelete