“Several years ago, I saw what appeared to be oxidant-induced cataracts. Two women had a very sudden onset of cataracts, and I asked about their diet and supplements; it turned out that one of them had begun taking 500 mg of zinc daily a few months earlier, and the other had begun taking 600 mg of zinc and 250 mg of iron, on her doctor’s recommendation, just a couple of months before the cataracts appeared.”

“I was walking across Hammersmith Bridge one day and a woman came up to me and said, ‘Do you remember me, Dr. Mason?’ I said no, I’m sorry. ‘I am the wife of a man that you treated with a skin rash on his feet, on his legs.’ I said oh, I remember him, how is he? She said, ‘Oh his skin rash is gone, but he is a changed person. He has become terribly irritable now.’ So I suddenly realized I had transformed an irritation of the skin to an irritation of the person, that the man was irritated. And one form was to scratch, and another form was to scratch his wife. So I realized I was converting things, not curing. And that made me want to understand about the mind, and what it can do. And so I became a psychoanalyst.”