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Problems We Face,
Solutions We Need
"He who does not know Jood, how can he
understand the diseases oj man?"
-Hippocrates, the father of medicine (460--357 B.C.)ON A GOLDEN MORNING IN 1946, when summer was all tuckered out and
fall wanted to be let in, all you could hear on my family's dairy farm was
quiet. There was no growl from cars driving by or airplanes burning
trails overhead. Just quiet. There were the songbirds, of course, and the
cows, and the roosters who would chime in once in a while, but these
noises merely filled out the quiet, the peace.
Standing on the second floor of our bam, with the immense brown
doors gaping open, allowing the sun to soak through, I was a happy
twelve-year-old. I had just finished a big country breakfast of eggs, ba-
con, sausage, fried potatoes and ham with a couple of glasses of whole
milk. My mom had cooked a fantastic meal. I had been working up my
appetite since 4:30 A.M., when I had gotten up to milk the cows with my
father Tom and my brother Jack.
My father, then forty-five, stood with me in the quiet sun. He opened
a fifty-pound sack of alfalfa seed, dumped all the tiny seeds on the
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