... men as a rule are more preoccupied with the dangers that threaten their life than interested in the biological forces on which they depend for a constructive existence.

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.

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 most important pathological effects of pollution are extremely delayed and indirect.

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

In 1946, Oxford University in England was offered large funds to create a new Institute of Human Nutrition. The University refused the funds on the ground that the knowledge of human nutrition was essentially complete, and that the proposed institution would soon run out of meaningful research projects.

But too often the goal of the planners is a universal gray state of health corresponding to absence of disease rather than to a positive attribute conducive to joyful and creative living. This kind of health will not rule out and may even generate another form of ill, the boredom which is the penalty of a formula of life where nothing is left unforeseen.