Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient by Norman Cousins

Quintet.”
    Don Pablo played it. His fingers were thin and the skin was pale but they belonged to the most extraordinary hands I had ever seen. They seemed to have a wisdom and a grace of their own. When he played Mozart, he was clearly the interpreter and not just the performer; yet it was difficult to imagine how the piece could be played in any other way.
    After he got up from the piano he apologized for having taken up so much time in our talk with music, instead of discussing the affairs of the world. I told him I had the impression that what he had been saying and doing were most relevant in terms of the world’s affairs. In the discussion that followed there seemed to be agreement on the proposition that the most serious part of the problem of world peace was that the individual felt helpless.
    â€œThe answer to helplessness is not so very complicated,” Don Pablo said. “A man can do something for peace without having to jump into politics. Each man has inside him a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes courage. It takes courage for a man to listen to his own goodness and act on it. Do we dare to be ourselves? This is the question that counts.”
    The decency and goodness within Don Pablo were clearly evident. But there were other resources—purpose, the will to live, faith, and good humor—that enabled him to cope with his infirmities and to perform as cellist and conductor well into his nineties.
    Albert Schweitzer always believed that the best medicine for any illness he might have was the knowledge that he had a job to do, plus a good sense of humor. He once said that disease tended to leave him rather rapidly because it found so little hospitality inside his body.
    The essence of Dr. Schweitzer was purpose and creativity. All his multiple skills and interests were energized by a torrential drive to use his mind and body. To observe him at work at his hospital in Lambarene was to see human purpose bordering on the supernatural. During an average day at the hospital, even after he turned ninety, he would attend to his duties at the clinic and make his rounds, do strenuous carpentry, move heavy crates of medicine, work on his correspondence (innumerable letters each day), give time to his unfinished manuscripts, and play the piano.
    â€œI have no intention of dying,” he once told his staff, “so long as I can do things. And if I do things, there is no need to die. So I will live a long, long time.”
    And he did—until he was ninety-five.
    Like his friend Pablo Casals, Albert Schweitzer would not allow a single day to pass without playing Bach. His favorite piece was the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. The piece was written for the organ. But there were no organs in Lambarene. There were two pianos, both uprights, both ancient. The one in the staff dining room was the more battered of the two. The equatorial climate, with its saturating humidity, had vanquished it almost beyond recognition. Some of the keys had no ivories; others were yellowed and cracked. The felt on the hammers had worn thin and produced harsh, twanging sounds. The instrument hadn’t been tuned in years; even if it had been, the improvement would have been short-lived. On my first visit to the hospital, I wandered into the dining room, sat down to play, then drew back abruptly at the caricatured tones. Yet the amazing thing was that Schweitzer could play hymns on it at dinnertime each evening and the piano somehow lost its poverty in his hands.
    The other piano was in his bungalow. It was in far better shape than the one in the dining room but it was hardly what one would call playable for a performer of Schweitzer’s worldwide reputation. It had an organ footboard attachment that was engineered into the hammer action, but this footboard had the infuriating habit of becoming