Codex HTML    Sir Peter Medawar    On ``The Effecting of All Things Possible''
  1. See E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World-Picture (London: 1943, 1960). This has some marvellous quotations demolishing the notion that the Copernican revolution first ``dethroned Man from the center of things'', made humanity seem a mere blip in a vast universe, etc., by showing that our cosmic insignificance was a common theme of medieval and Renaissance works. (Remember where Dante put Lucifer.) What was disturbing was the de-animation and de-sacralization of the universe, not our eccentric place therein.
  2. An echo of the famous Hippocratic Aphorism (I, i)?
    Life is short, and Art long; the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and decision difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and externals cooperate.
  3. Part I, Chapter VI, paragraphs 39 and 35, respectively.
  4. Clearly, Medawar was spared having to use the Internet. Cf. Vannevar Bush, ``As We May Think''.
  5. The first quotation is to be found in the penultimate paragraph of Part I, Chapter VI; I am unable to locate the second, or any obvious variant of it, in the on-line version of Leviathan.