Diseases are a natural phenomenon, and one must learn to regard them as a natural and inherent condition of human life.
Neglecting the health of your body deprives you of being able to serve others. Worrying too much about your body has the same effect. There is one way of finding the mean: care for your body to the point that it does not interfere with or get in the way of your service.
An ill person stops living and focuses all of his life on treatment. It would be much better, regardless of whether an illness is curable or not, to live a normal life without paying attention to your disease, which, even if it is shortened by the disease (which is always doubtful), would nevertheless be life and not constant fear and anxiety about your body.
There is no illness that can prevent a human being from fulfilling his duty. If you cannot serve people with labor, then serve as an example of loving endurance.
Diseases of thought are more deadly and occur more often than diseases of the body.
— Cicero
The dictum of Hippocrates, which states that the primary principle of medicine is to do no harm, is often ignored with respect to the body; with respect to the soul it is never applied.
The rule to do no harm to the body was not observed by the bloodlettings of the past, and it is not observed now by the administration of poisonous medicaments and much else. Of the harm to the soul, which always accompanies any kind of treatment, no one even thinks or talks about. And meanwhile, this harm consists in the justification of the crudest egotism: the demand that others serve you instead of you serving others.
Do not fear illness, fear treatment—treatment not in the sense of harmful medicaments, but in the sense of assuming that being ill frees you from moral obligations.
