The Future

Abstract

During the months that I have spent revising this book, there have been many times when the contrast between the lines on the title page:

Cancer, created by life itself, exists within life, Yet in the end makes life untenable,

and those at the head of this chapter, has struck me with great force. Nurses may have wondered whether they, or I, have any right to optimism, or whether we should hold only to the fatalism that ‘Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward’? I would rather say that the first lines are the present, but that there is every prospect of at least a partial fulfilment of our dream in the not too distant future.