Science & Tech Quote by W. H. Auden

Auden slips a small heresy into a fatherly aside: healing is not a science. Coming from a poet, the provocation isn’t anti-medicine so much as anti-arrogance. “Papa would tell me” frames the line as inherited wisdom, the kind that survives not because it’s provable but because it’s been tested against real bodies, real grief, real waiting. The domestic voice softens the challenge while also giving it authority; this isn’t a manifesto, it’s a maxim whispered over a sickbed.

The real engine here is the verb “wooing.” Auden drags healing out of the lab and into courtship: persuasion, patience, tact, attentiveness to moods. Science implies control and repeatability; wooing implies you can’t command the outcome, only create conditions where nature might cooperate. That choice of metaphor also makes “nature” less a machine than a partner with agency - temperamental, resilient, sometimes indifferent. It’s a quietly humbling view of the healer’s role: not the hero who conquers illness, but the facilitator who coaxes a body back toward its own momentum.

In the early-to-mid 20th century, medicine was rapidly professionalizing and technologizing, often with a confidence that bordered on triumphalism. Auden’s line pushes back, insisting on a truth clinicians still grapple with: protocol matters, but so does judgment, bedside manner, timing, and the acceptance that recovery isn’t always engineerable. Subtextually, it’s also a credo for art itself. Poetry, like healing, can’t be reduced to a method; it works by intuition, by “wooing” the human animal toward recognition and repair.