Human life implies adventure, and there is no adventure without struggles and dangers.

The mechanisms of vis medicatrix naturæ—the most healing power of nature—are so effective that most diseases are self-terminating.

The wooing of the Earth thus implies much more than converting the wilderness into humanized environments. It means also preserving natural environments in which to experience mysteries transcending daily life and from which to recapture, in a Proustian kind of remembrance, the awareness of the cosmic forces that have shaped humankind.

The very process of living is a continual interplay between the individual and his environment, often taking the form of a struggle resulting in injury or disease.

It is a disturbing fact that Western civilization, which claims to have achieved the highest standard of health in history, finds itself compelled to spend ever-increasing sums for the control of disease.

But solving problems of disease is not the same thing as creating health and happiness. (...) Health and happiness are the expression of the manner in which the individual responds and adapts to the challenges that he meets in everyday life.

... each type of civilization has had diseases peculiar to it and at each period the various social groups in any community also have differed in this regard.