Sep19

comfort always.

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day two of our return to school

 we all find comfort in our own way

a donkey, a pillow, a bus, a dragon

  each makes all the difference to someone. 

 

—

“cure sometimes, treat often, comfort always.”

-hippocrates

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  6. Your quotation at the end strikes me as coming from our own times rather than from Greece more than 2000 years ago. The article in The British Journal of General Practice at

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2784544/

    notes a similar saying: ‘To cure sometimes, to relieve often, and to comfort always.’ The article says that that version has been “cited as a 15th century folk saying…” and is “the rallying cry of the palliative care profession. Hippocrates might comment, ‘I wish I’d said that’.”

    My intuition is that this is yet another example of a familiar phenomenon: someone in our own times attributes a sentiment to someone famous (in this case Hippocrates, “the father of medicine”) to make the sentiment seem authoritative and therefore worthy of being followed.

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