Want to cure anybody of anything, find out who doesn't have it

“Want to cure anybody of anything, find out who doesn't have it” is Dr. Benway’s compact rule for investigating disease. Spoken amid his claims about schizophrenia and addiction, it redirects attention from the diagnosed patient toward the apparent exception. Its force is both methodological and unsettling: comparison may suggest new questions, but Benway’s confidence does not resolve the uncertainty surrounding his theories or the coercive medical system in which he works.

The Maxim in Benway’s Account

Benway offers the expression while describing patients who, he says, had been diagnosed with schizophrenia six months earlier and are now waiting for heroin. He contrasts their earlier condition with their present state and claims never to have encountered a schizophrenic junky in his practice. The apparent absence of the diagnosis among addicts becomes his prompt to ask who does not have the condition, and why.

That observation does not amount to a demonstrated cure. Benway explicitly says he does not yet know why addicts do not have schizophrenia. He proposes that addiction imposes contact, whereas a person with schizophrenia may ignore hunger and starve if unfed. The maxim therefore opens an inquiry rather than supplying its answer: the experience of dependence may alter how a person relates to bodily need, but Benway leaves the relation between that change and the diagnosis unresolved.

A Comparative Theory of Disease

The line belongs to a larger effort to explain mental illness through bodily processes. Benway suggests that schizophrenia may be a drug psychosis, points to substances that can produce states approximating it, and speculates about a metabolic connection he calls a “Man Within.” He also mentions a Bolivian region whose inhabitants he describes as free of psychosis, proposing a study of diet, drugs and alcohol, and sex. His interest is not in what those inhabitants think, but in what their metabolism might reveal.

Read in this context, the maxim names a comparative procedure: seek out a group that appears not to share a disorder, then investigate the conditions that might account for the difference. Yet the examples remain claims and conjectures made by Benway, not settled findings. His movement from addiction to schizophrenia, and from a population’s apparent mental health to its habits and physiology, reveals the breadth of his speculation without establishing its causes.

Clinical Knowledge and Control

Elsewhere, Benway describes the processing of suspected agents, saboteurs, and political deviants as an assembly-line operation. He presents interrogation as an assault on personal identity and discusses drugs and disciplinary procedures as tools for breaking resistance. The maxim’s language of discovery thus sits within a practice in which medical knowledge is entangled with institutional power: identifying a condition, or its apparent absence, can serve inquiry, but diagnosis also helps organize coercive treatment.

Carl Peterson’s examination offers a contrasting instance of clinical uncertainty being wrapped in official procedure. A state doctor describes sexual deviation as a sickness and argues that public-health obligations may justify compulsory treatment. He acknowledges that its causes are not fully understood, then invokes hereditary, social, and environmental factors before ordering a diagnostic test. The scene does not directly apply Benway’s maxim, but it echoes its central problem: authorities classify conditions and propose explanations even when knowledge remains incomplete.

Meaning and Limits

The expression sounds like a practical research maxim, but the surrounding episodes make its promise uneasy. Benway’s comparison begins from an asserted exception among addicts and generates hypotheses about need, metabolism, and mental illness; it does not show that absence of a diagnosis proves health, or that one condition cures another. The phrase is most revealing as a window onto his way of thinking: look for the counterexample, but do not mistake an intriguing contrast for an established explanation.

The novel places that inquiry beside withdrawal notes, the narrator’s account of a life narrowed around heroin, and a discussion of Bang-utot that openly admits the absence of an organic explanation for death. Across these different accounts, bodily experience, diagnostic labels, and causal theories do not neatly coincide. Benway’s maxim gives that uncertainty a memorable form: the search for what is missing may sharpen the question, while leaving the answer—and the consequences of acting on a theory—open.