Maladies Quotes

Three invalids. - Sufferings of George and Harris. - A victim to one hundred and seven fatal maladies. - Useful prescriptions. - Cure for liver complaint in children. - We agree that we are overworked, and need rest. - A week on the rolling deep? - George suggests the River. - Montmorency lodges an objection. - Original motion carried by majority of three to one. ~ Jerome K. Jerome

As soon as he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid. There are maladies we must not seek to cure because they alone protect us from others that are more serious. ~ Marcel Proust

The reason the program is so successful is because alcoholics help other alcoholics. I've never met a Normie (our lingo for a person who doesn't have a problem with drugs and alcohol) who could even conceive of what it's like to be an alcoholic. Normies are always going, 'There's this new pill you can take and you won't want to shoot heroin anymore.' That shows a fundamental misunderstanding of alcoholism and drug addiction. These aren't just physical allergies, they're obsessions of the mind and maladies of the spirit. It's a threefold disease. And if it's partly a spiritual malady, then there's a spiritual cure. ~ Anthony Kiedis

It is only necessary to make war with five things; with the maladies of the body, the ignorances of the mind, with the passions of the body, with the seditions of the city and the discords of families. ~ Pythagoras

The politicized sponsors of this pseudoscientific nonsense should be ashamed to live, let alone die. If you want to take part in the "war" against cancer, and other terrible maladies, too, then join the battle against their lethal stupidity. ~ Christopher Hitchens

My apologies, see, I forgot my manners.
I get on the mic 'cause it's my life. You show off for girls and cameras.
You a pop star, not a rapper. A Vanilla Ice or a Hammer.
Y'all hear this crap he dumping out? Somebody get him a Pamper.
And a crown for me. The best have heard about me.
You can only spell "brilliant" by first spelling Bri.
You see, naturally, I do my shit with perfection.
Better call a bodyguard 'cause you gon' need some protection,
And on this here election, the people crown a new leader.
You didn't see this coming, and your ghostwriters didn't either.
I came here to ether. I'm sorry to do this to you.
This is no longer a battle, it's your funeral, boo. I'm murdering you.
On my corner they call me coroner, I'm warning ya.
Tell the truth, this dude is borin' ya.
You confused like a foreigner. I'll explain with ease:
You're just a casualty in the reality of the madness of Bri.
No fallacies, I spit maladies, causin' fatalities,
And do it casually, damaging rappers without bandaging.
Imagining managing my own label, my own salary.
And actually, factually, there's no MC that's as bad as me.
Milez? That's cute. But it don't make me cower.
I move at light speed, you stuck at per hour.
You spit like a lisp. I spit like a high power.
Bri's the future, and you Today like Matt Lauer.
You coward. But you're a G? It ain't convincing to me.
You talk ab ~ Angie Thomas

The disease which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity of youth, had left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death ~ Edgar Allan Poe

So much dung, filth, and entrails of dead beasts and other corruptions is cast into ditches, rivers and other waterways, and many other places, within about and near to the cities, boroughs and towns of the realm ... that the air is greatly corrupted and infected and many maladies and other intolerable diseases do daily happen ... '64 They ordered fines of £20 to be levied on all those who had not remedied the situation within a year, and passed the responsibility for keeping the streets clean to local officers. ~ Ian Mortimer

There are some chagrins of the heart which a friend ought to try to console without betraying a knowledge of their existence, as there are physical maladies which a physician ought to seek to heal without letting the sufferer know that he has discovered their extent. ~ Marguerite Gardiner, Countess Of Blessington

The soul's maladies have their relapses like the body's. What we take for a cure is often just a momentary rally or a new form of the disease. ~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

The cross unerringly exposes this stunningly marvelous and abruptly exquisite declaration that God will not let this single life of mine, with all of its grotesque maladies and pathetic filth pass into oblivion without unflinchingly declaring that my life carries a value worth the expenditure of His. And if I dare look upon the cross, I am utterly perplexed but wholly enraptured by the immensity of such a love as this. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Turkey tail mushrooms have been used to treat various maladies for hundreds of years in Asia, Europe, and by indigenous peoples in North America. Records of turkey tail brewed as medicinal tea date from the early 15th century, during the Ming Dynasty in China. ~ Paul Stamets

Round the cabin stood half a dozen mountain ashes, as the rowans, inimical to witches, are there called. On the worn planks of the door were nailed two horse-shoes, and over the lintel and spreading along the thatch, grew, luxuriant, patches of that ancient cure for many maladies, and prophylactic against the machinations of the evil one, the house-leek. Descending into the doorway, in the chiaroscuro of the interior, when your eye grew sufficiently accustomed to that dim light, you might discover, hanging at the head of the widow's wooden-roofed bed, her beads and a phial of holy water ~ J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago--centuries, ages, eons, ago!--for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane--like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell--mouths mercy and invented hell--mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!...
"You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that ~ Mark Twain

Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind. ~ Thomas Carlyle

The maladies of the spirit alone, in abstracto, that is, error and sin, can be called diseases of the mind only per analogiam. They come not within the jurisdiction of the physician, but that of the teacher or clergyman, who again are called physicians of the mind only per analogiam. ~ Ernst Von Feuchtersleben

I believe that the imperative need of the day is not simply revival, but a radical reformation that will go to the root of our moral and spiritual maladies and deal with causes rather than with consequences, with the disease rather than with symptoms. ~ Aiden Wilson Tozer

What can be sadder than a discouraged artist dying not from his own commonplace maladies, but from the cancer of oblivion? ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Up to the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is tainted with egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have care of us. It is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise with the entirety of life, not with life's sores and maladies merely, but with life's joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom. ~ Oscar Wilde

There is only one ultimate and effectual preventative for the maladies to which flesh is heir, and that is death. ~ Harvey Williams Cushing

He who immerses himself in sexual intercourse will be assailed by premature aging, his strength will wane, his eyes will weaken, and a bad odour will emit from his mouth and his armpits, his teeth will fall out and many other maladies will afflict him. ~ Maimonides

Our bodies are always exposed to Satan. The maladies I suffer are not natural, but Devil's spells. ~ Martin Luther

Reflecting on various aspects of our lives is essential for a person to grow and adjust to changing phases in their life. Self-analysis entails examining a person's existing level of self-esteem and documenting the inner voice that speaks to a person, which is frequently either affirming of self-defeating. Failure to periodically engage in self-analysis, make crucial revisions in our personas, and modify our thinking patterns when we encounter transformative events in life can lead to mood disorders, burnout, and other emotional maladies. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

For the mind depends so much on the temperament and disposition of the bodily organs that, if it is possible to find a means of rendering men wiser and cleverer than they have hitherto been, I believe that it is in medicine that it must be sought. It is true that the medicine which is now in vogue contains little of which the utility is remarkable; but, without having any intention of decrying it, I am sure that there is no one, even among those who make its study a profession, who does not confess that all that men know is almost nothing in comparison with what remains to be known; and that we could be free of an infinitude of maladies both of body and mind, and even also possibly of the infirmities of age, if we had sufficient knowledge of their causes, and of all the remedies with which nature has provided us. ~ Rene Descartes

I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves. [in response to Rousseau's "The Social Contract"] ~ Voltaire

Numerous observations made upon fevers, somnambulisms, and other human maladies, seem to prove that the moon does exercise some mysterious influence upon man. ~ Jules Verne

We're a nation with an eating disorder, and we know it. The multiple maladies caused by bad eating are taking a dire toll on our health
most tragically for our kids, who are predicted to be this country's first generation to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. That alone is a stunning enough fact to give us pause. So is a government policy that advises us to eat more fruits and vegetables, while doling out subsidies not to fruit and vegetable farmers, but to commodity crops destined to become soda pop and cheap burgers. The Farm Bill, as of this writing, could aptly be called the Farm Kill, both for its effects on small farmers and for what it does to us, the consumers who are financing it. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Interpreter of Maladies is the title of one of the stories in the book. And the phrase itself was something I thought of before I even wrote that story. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

That is why they have poets - to classify all the degrees of love. It is for scientists to classify the maladies arising from the want of it. ~ Sarah Ruhl

Hysteria and degeneration have always existed; but they formerly showed themselves sporadically, and had no importance in the life of the whole community. It was only the vast fatigue which was experienced by the generation on which the multitudes of discoveries and innovations burst abruptly, imposing on it organic exigencies greatly surpassing its strength, which created favourable conditions under which these maladies could gain ground enormously, and become a danger to civilization. ~ Max Nordau

One of the greatest crimes committed by this present Christian generation is its neglect of the gospel, and it is from this neglect that all our other maladies spring forth. The lost world is not so much gospel hardened as it is gospel ignorant because many of those who proclaim the gospel are also ignorant of its most basic truths. The essential themes that make up the very core of the gospel - the justice of God, the radical depravity of man, the blood atonement, the nature of true conversion, and the biblical basis of assurance - are absent from too many pulpits. Churches reduce the gospel message to a few creedal statements, teach that conversion is a mere human decision, and pronounce assurance of salvation over anyone who prays the sinner's prayer. ~ Paul David Washer

And so, it is not our own life that we live, but the lives of the dead, and the soul that dwells within us is no single spiritual entity, making us personal and individual, created for our service, and entering into us for our joy. It is something that has dwelt in fearful places, and in ancient sepulchres has made its abode. It is sick with many maladies, and has memories of curious sins. It is wiser than we are, and its wisdom is bitter. It fills us with impossible desires, and makes us follow what we know we cannot gain. One thing, however, Ernest, it can do for us. It can lead us away from surroundings whose beauty is dimmed to us by the mist of familiarity, or whose ignoble ugliness and sordid claims are marring the perfection of our development. It can help us to leave the age in which we were born, and to pass into other ages, and find ourselves not exiled from their air. It can teach us how to escape from our experience, and to realise the experiences of those who are greater than we are. The pain of Leopardi crying out against life becomes our pain. Theocritus blows on his pipe, and we laugh with the lips of nymph and shepherd. In the wolfskin of Pierre Vidal we flee before the hounds, and in the armour of Lancelot we ride from the bower of the Queen. We have whispered the secret of our love beneath the cowl of Abelard, and in the stained raiment of Villon have put our shame into song. We can see the dawn through Shelley's eyes, and when we wander with Endymion the M ~ Oscar Wilde

Doctors came to see her singly and in consultation, talked much in French, German, and Latin, blamed one another, and prescribed a great variety of medicines for all the diseases known to them, but the simple idea never occurred to any of them that they could not know the disease that Natasha was suffering from, as no disease suffered by a by a live man can be known, for every living person has his own peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated disease, unknown to medicine - not a disease of the lungs, liver, skin, heart, nerves, and so on mentioned in medical books, but a disease consisting of one of the innumerable combinations of the maladies of those organs. ~ Leo Tolstoy

In the City Market is the Meet Café. Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up harmine, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, Tithonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World War III, excusers of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of unconstituted police states, a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Bang-utot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy, sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, doctors skilled in the treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human host, maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war... A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum... Larval entities waiting for a Live One... ~ William S. Burroughs

I look out again at the sun-my first full gaze. It is blood-red and men are walking about on rooftops. Everything above the horizon is clear to me. It is like Easter Sunday. Death is behind me and birth too. I am going to live now among the life maladies. I am going to live the spiritual life of the pygmy, the secret life of the little man in the wilderness of the bush. Inner and outer have changed places. Equilibrium is no longer the goal-the scales must be destroyed. Let me hear you promise again all those sunny things you carry inside you. Let me try to believe for one day, while I rest in the open, that the sun brings good tidings. Let me rot in splendor while the sun bursts in your womb. I believe all your lies implicitly. I take you as the personification of evil, as the destroyer of the soul, as the maharanee of the night. Tack your womb up on my wall, so that I may remember you. We must get going. Tomorrow, tomorrow ... ~ Henry Miller

The books I love most are the ones that combine some sort of gripping story with really beautiful or stylish writing. Some of my favorites are 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy, 'The Virgin Suicides' by Jeffrey Eugenides, 'The Interpreter of Maladies' by Jhumpa Lahiri, and 'Blindness' by Jose Saramago. ~ Karen Thompson Walker

You might think my chosen career would lend me insight…. But while I can tell you about the brain as a physical object…, beyond that I am a glorified techie. I know the nuts and bolts and can diagnose flaws within the mainframe. While I can identify and sometimes fix structural maladies within that organ, I do not remotely understand it. That is an impossible task, like trying to guess the path rainwater will take down a windowpane. There is simply no way to know with any accuracy what is happening inside someone else's head. I only faintly comprehend what is going on inside my own. ~ Craig Davidson

There are no maladies in my golf game. My golf game stinks. ~ Jack Nicklaus

The soul is cured of its maladies by certain incantations; these incantations are beautiful reasons, from which temperance is generated in souls. ~ Socrates

At the beginning of this study on the conditions of suggestion, we have admitted that suggestion could not develop in sickly minds - that it demanded, in order to attain to its full power, minds relatively sane. We have just now demonstrated that it depended on a lack of synthesis, on a weakening of consciousness. Are not these two affirmations contradictory ? Not at all. A symptom may disappear in certain maladies and still remain a pathological symptom. The crepitant rale does not exist in all stages of pneumonia; it disappears in many serious lung affections; it is none the less a very characteristic sign of the disease. ~ Anonymous

The most unhappy of all men is the man who cannot tell what he is going to do, who has got no work cut-out for him in the world, and does not go into it. For work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind,honest work, which you intend getting done. ~ Thomas Carlyle

When God does not answer His children according to the letter, He does so according to the spirit. If thou askest for coarse meal, wilt thou be angered because He gives thee the finest flour? If thou seekest bodily health, shouldst thou complain if instead thereof He makes thy sickness turn to the healing of spiritual maladies? ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream - I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal - to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. ~ Oscar Wilde

For example, you may be polite and courteous to someone in your office, but when his back is turned, you are very critical and resentful toward him in your mind. Such negative thoughts are highly destructive to you. It is like taking poison. You are actually taking mental poisons, which rob you of vitality, enthusiasm, strength, guidance, and good will. These negative thoughts and emotions sink down into your subconscious, and cause all kinds of difficulties and maladies in your life. The ~ Joseph Murphy

no disease suffered by a live man can be known, for every living person has his own peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated disease, unknown to medicine -- not a disease of the lungs, liver, skin, heart, nerves, and so on mentioned in medical books, but a disease consisting of one of the innumerable combinations of the maladies of those organs. This simple thought could not occur to the doctors (as it cannot occur to a wizard that he is unable to work his charms) because the business of their lives was to cure, and they received money for it and had spent the best years of their lives on that business. But above all that thought was kept out of their minds by the fact that they saw they were really useful [...] Their usefulness did not depend on making the patient swallow substances for the most part harmful (the harm was scarcely perceptible because they were given in small doses) but they were useful, necessary, and indispensable because they satisfied a mental need of the invalid and those who loved her -- and that is why there are, and always will be, pseudo-healers, wise women, homoeopaths, and allopaths. They satisfied that eternal human need for hope of relief, for sympathy, and that something should be done, which is felt by those who are suffering. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Anyhow, he asks himself, what is an intimate secret? Is that where we hide what's most mysterious, most singular, most original about a human being? Are her intimate secrets what make Chantal the unique being he loves? No. What people keep secret is the most common, the most ordinary, the most prevalent thing, the same thing everybody has: the body and its needs, it maladies, its manias - constipation, for instance, or menstruation. We ashamedly conceal these intimate matters not because they are so personal but because, on the contrary, they are so lamentably impersonal. How can he resent Chantal, for belonging to her sex, for resembling other women, for wearing a brassiere and along with it the brassiere psychology? s if he didn't himself belong to some eternal masculine idiocy! They both of them got their start in that putterer's workshop where their eyes were botched with the disjointed action of the eyelid and where a reeking little factory was installed in their bellies. They both of them have bodies where their poor souls have almost no room. Shouldn't they forgive that in each other? Shouldn't they move beyond the little weaknesses they're hiding at the bottom of drawers? He was gripped by an enormous compassion, and to draw a final lune under that whole story, he decided to write her one last letter. ~ Milan Kundera

When we hold-on to someone's imperfections we become emotionally pair-bonded to their maladies. ~ Bryant McGill

For decades, the Arab states have seemed exceptions to the laws of politics and human nature. While liberty expanded in many parts of the globe, these nations were left behind, their 'freedom deficit' signaling the political underdevelopment that accompanied many other economic and social maladies. ~ Elliott Abrams

Only the emerging specialty of psychoanalysis seemed to understand that mental maladies are not fully analogous to physical disease. They resist classification, and might better be known by their symptoms and the individualized sufferings of patients than by assigned names. ~ Sherwin B. Nuland

At a period when Literature was wont to attribute the grief of living exclusively to the mischances of disappointed love or the jealousy of adulterous deceptions, he had said not a word of these childish maladies, but had sounded those more incurable, more poignant and more profound: wounds that are inflicted by satiety, disillusion and contempt in ruined souls tortured by the present, disgusted with the past, terrified and desperate of the future. ~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

It is one of the maladies of our age to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues are at stake. ~ Norman Douglas

During those periods in which our bitterness of spirit, though steadily diminishing, still persists, a distinction must be drawn between the bitterness which comes to us from our constantly thinking of the person herself and that which is revived by certain memories, some cutting speech, some word in a letter that we have had from her. The various forms which that bitterness can assume we shall examine when we come to deal with another and later love affair; for the present it must suffice to say that, of these two kinds, the former is infinitely the less cruel. That is because our conception of the person, since it dwells always within ourselves, is there adorned with the halo with which we are bound before long to invest her, and bears the marks if not of the frequent solace of hope, at any rate of the tranquillity of a permanent sorrow. (It must also be observed that the image of a person who makes us suffer counts for little if anything in those complications which aggravate the unhappiness of love, prolong it and prevent our recovery, just as in certain maladies the cause is insignificant beyond comparison with the fever which follows it and the time that must elapse before our convalescence.) ~ Marcel Proust

The capacity to see the big picture is perhaps the most important as an antidote to the variety of psychic woes brought forth by the remarkable prosperity and plentitude of our times. Many of us are crunched for time, deluged by information, and paralyzed by the weight of too many choices. The best prescription for these modern maladies may be to approach one's own life in a contextual, big picture fashion - to distinguish between what really matters and what merely annoys. ~ Daniel H. Pink

A good man will extend his munificence to the industrious poor of all persuasions reduced by age, infirmity, or accident; to thosewho labour under incurable maladies; and to the youth of either sex, who are capable of beginning the world with advantage, but have not the means. ~ Samuel Richardson

I've often been flabbergasted by modern pharmaceutical ads on television. The list of side effects for some maladies often sound worse than the condition they're supposed to treat. Once I even heard "heart failure" listed as a side effect, and I wondered how that happened. Heart failure sounds like a pretty major event to me, and if you're willing to risk heart failure in order to avoid the mild discomfort of some other condition, then may the gods shield you from harm, since you're obviously seeking it out. ~ Kevin Hearne

I want to see all oppressed people throughout the world free. And the only way we can do this is by moving toward a revolutionary society where the needs and wishes of all people can be respected.' With these words the radical philosophy professor Angela Davis paraphrases Isaiah's ancient messianic dream of the lion that will peacefully lie down with the lamb in a completely good world. But what the Biblical prophet perhaps could not know is contained with a clarity that leaves nothing to be desired in the opening sentence of an address of the French Senate to Napoleon I: Sire, the desire for perfection is one of the worst maladies that can affect the human mind. ~ Paul Watzlawick

In the moral calculus of currently prevailing state capitalism, profits and bonuses in the next quarter greatly outweigh concern for the welfare of one's grandchildren, and since these are institutional maladies, they will not be easy to overcome. While much remains uncertain, we can assure ourselves, with fair confidence, that future generations will not forgive us our silence and apathy. ~ Noam Chomsky

It is no sign of benediction to have been obsessed with the lives of saints, for it is an obsession intertwined with a taste for maladies and hunger for depravities. One only troubles oneself with saints because one has been disappointed by the paradoxes of earthly life; one therefore searches out other paradoxes, more outlandish in guise, redolent of unknown truths, unknown perfumes ... ~ Emil Cioran

Fixed ideas, so frequent and of such importance among hystericals, are generally isolated in their minds. Whether they constitute attacks, or develop in a subconscious manner, they do not disturb the whole thought of the ' SoUier, Guide pratique des maladies mentales, 1893. ' Regis, Manuel de me'd/cine mentale, 1892, p. 490. 30 patients. Yet it is easy to understand how the neighbourhood of these fixed ideas, these parasites, may be very dangerous to normal consciousness, and that in many circumstances general disturbances of the whole thought may be the result of the development of fixed ideas. ~ Anonymous

The cure for our modern maladies is dirt under the fingernails and the feel of thick grass between the toes. The cure for our listlessness is to be out within the invigorating wind. The cure for our uselessness is to take back up our stewardship; for it is not that there has been no work to be done, we simply have not been attending to it. ~ L.M. Browning

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them; they can inflict on them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies succeeding one another without interruption in the bosom of a family will not make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of its physician. ~ Marcel Proust