THOSE two quotes from Doctors, Disease and Health sum up almost everything Cyril Scott had to say in all the books he wrote on the subject. He not only provided advice on medical matters, but also offered a spiritual answer to the troubling question of why one person could be healed and another not. One may think it unusual to find philosophy and therapeutics together in the same volume, but Scott was a most unusual man, whose philosophy embraced both the physical and the spiritual and whose motto was Unity in Diversity.

Over a period of thirty years, beginning in 1939 and ending in 1968, he published a total of ten books and pamphlets: four books on doctors and medicine, a book and a pamphlet on cancer, and four pamphlets on a variety of other health topics. The first book, Doctors, Disease and Health, was by far the most comprehensive, and Scott thought it the best book he wrote. The other volumes are mainly shorter and revised versions of this first publication or, in the case of the booklets on black molasses, cider vinegar and constipation, variations of passages within it.

The book includes chapters on the cause of disease, on diet and nutrition, on vaccination and inoculation, on constipation, on commercialism and on alternative systems of medicine, and also has one chapter on astrology and another on reincarnation, because the human body, in Scott's view, was an instrument of the soul, ‘to be made as efficient as possible for preliminary steps towards mental and spiritual evolution’.

What caused him to turn to writing therapeutic books Scott explained in his Simpler and Safer Remedies for Grievous Ills: