Science & Tech Quote by Norman Cousins

Cousins is politely detonating a cultural reflex: the white-coat assumption that expertise equals omniscience. The line is staged as a modest request ("reasonable to expect"), but its intent is insurgent. He’s asking doctors not just to be skilled technicians, but to practice epistemic humility in a system that rewards certainty, speed, and authority. The word "recognize" matters: this isn’t a plea for doctors to learn more science; it’s a demand that they admit what science, as an institution, can’t reliably capture.

The subtext is an argument about power. When medicine frames every ailment as a solvable technical problem, the patient’s experience becomes data to be managed, not a life to be understood. Cousins pushes back against the idea that what can’t be measured isn’t real: pain that doesn’t scan, suffering that doesn’t chart, healing that happens through meaning, trust, community, or time. By pairing "health" with "healing", he splits the clinical outcome from the human process. One is the domain of tests and protocols; the other includes narrative, expectation, and the messy psychological and social conditions that shape recovery.

Context sharpens the critique. Cousins became famous for challenging medical fatalism after his own illness, and his broader work helped legitimize a more patient-centered view of care. Coming from an author rather than a physician, the sentence reads like a citizen’s corrective to professional overreach: respect science, but don’t worship it. In an era still chasing miracle cures and one-size-fits-all treatments, it lands as a reminder that medicine’s greatest tool may be candor about its limits.