“Disease was a perverse, a dissolute form of life.”

To Dr. Scarborough; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

The Great Indian Novel (1989)

Source: Epistles and Satires of Alexander Pope

I didn't try to reach the sense of this. I understood the point of it was to transpose the locus of authority from the works to the discussion of the works. The writer had assumed the role of validating authority for the images he discussed. In order to do this he had been required to transform what he saw with his eyes into ideologies that he could 'see' with his intellect.
Page 18.
The Ancestor Game (1992)

Source: Life and How to Survive It

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 117

Aequanimitas (1889)
Context: In a true and perfect form, imperturbability is indissolubly associated with wide experience and an intimate knowledge of the varied aspects of disease. With such advantages he is so equipped that no eventuality can disturb the mental equilibrium of the physician; the possibilities are always manifest, and the course of action clear. From its very nature this precious quality is liable to be misinterpreted, and the general accusation of hardness, so often brought against the profession, has here its foundation. Now a certain measure of insensibility is not only an advantage, but a positive necessity in the exercise of a calm judgment, and in carrying out delicate operations. Keen sensibility is doubtless a virtue of high order, when it does not interfere with steadiness of hand or coolness of nerve; but for the practitioner in his working-day world, a callousness which thinks only of the good to be effected, and goes ahead regardless of smaller considerations, is the preferable quality.
Cultivate, then, gentlemen, such a judicious measure of obtuseness as will enable you to meet the exigencies of practice with firmness and courage, without, at the same time, hardening "the human heart by which we live."

Source: The Veil of Tears

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 328.