This extended version of the passage in the program was excerpted from the chapter, "The Blood Is the Life," in The Wisdom of the Body by Sherwin Nuland:
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 doctor's, 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.
We have always known this. Every system of so-called primitive medicine I have ever encountered views disease as the imbalance of certain factors, whose proper interrelationships must be reestablished if recovery is to take place. The ancient heritage of Western scientific medicine is no different. Hippocrates and his followers inherited from earlier healers the belief in the four humors, whose equilibrium maintains health: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. Although we have long since abandoned those seemingly fanciful conceits, their symbolism remains, and some of us have begun to wonder whether they will prove, after all these centuries, to be more than symbols. We speak nowadays of such things as hormones, and transmitters, and tissue factors floating around our bodies, and we have even come to introduce terminology that sounds eerily familiar, as though emerged from some cobwebbed cranny in the long-forgotten cellar of our history—such as humoral-mediated immunity.
I have spent the adult years of my life being nature's cornerman. I have provided it with whatever boost was needed, cheered it on, and felt the exhilaration of watching its formidable powers wheel into action once I have helped remove the impediments. An inflamed organ is excised, an obstruction is bypassed, excessive hormone levels are reduced, a cancerous region is swept clean of tumor-bearing tissue—and the wrongs are redressed, thus allowing cells and tissues to take over the process of reconstituting equilibrium. Surgeons are no more than agents of the process by which an offending force may be sufficiently held at bay to aid nature in its inherent tendency to restore health. For me, surgery has been the distilled essence of W. H. Auden's perceptive précis of all medicine: "Healing," said the poet, "is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature."
