The art of healing is like an unroofed temple, uncovered at the top and cracked at the foundation.
Interpretation
Healing is a complex and imperfect process, much like a flawed structure.
Benjamin Rush's quote emphasizes the intricate and often precarious nature of healing, suggesting that it is not a straightforward endeavor, but rather one that involves great vulnerability and foundational issues. Just as an unroofed temple is exposed and incomplete, healing requires openness and acknowledgment of underlying cracks or pain before true restoration can occur.
In practice
In a speech about mental health awareness, one might use this quote to illustrate the challenges of healing.
...This large and expensive stock of drugs will be unnecessary. By...doses of...medicines...multiplying...combining them properly, 20 to 30 articles, aided by the common resources of the lancet, a garden, a kitchen, fresh air, cool water, exercise, will be sufficient to cure all the diseases that are at present under the power of medicine.
The Bible, when not read in schools, is seldom read in any subsequent period of life...The Bible...should be read in our schools in preference to all other books because it contains the greatest portion of that kind of knowledge which is calculated to produce private and public happiness.
The gospel of Jesus Christ prescribes the wisest rules for just conduct in every situation in life. Happy they who are enabled to obey them in all situations!
Dissections daily convince us of our ignorance of the seats of diseases, and cause us to blush at our prescriptions. How often are we disappointed in our expectation from the most certain and powerful of our remedies, by the negligence or obstinacy of our patients! What mischief have we done under the belief of false facts and false theories! We have assisted in multiplying diseases. We have done more β we have increased their mortality.
Temperate, sincere, and intelligent inquiry and discussion are only to be dreaded by the advocates of error. The truth need not fear them.
[W]here there is no law, there is no liberty; and nothing deserves the name of law but that which is certain and universal in its operation upon all the members of the community.
I work as diligently on my canvases as the laborers do in their fields.
I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child.
A number of images put together a certain way become something quite above and beyond what any of them are individually.
Composition is for the most part an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.
If you write for God you will reach many men and bring them joy. If you write for men--you may make some money and you may give someone a little joy and you may make a noise in the world, for a little while. If you write for yourself, you can read what you yourself have written and after ten minutes you will be so disgusted that you will wish that you were dead.
The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.
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