Cura te ipsum ("Physician, heal thyself!") is a classical injunction, urging medical doctors to heal themselves first. This Latin dictum is relevant in many traditional societies in which only the medicine men who already suffered from a given disease are allowed to cure it.
Saint Luke the Apostle made Cura te ipsum famous in the Luke 4:23 passage of the Vulgate.
A physician himself, Saint Luke must have known the previous conceptual environment of the Hippocratic school, notably its first aphoristic Ars longa, vita brevis , tempus praeceps, judicium difficile,experimentum periculosum ("The art is long, life is short, time is short, decisions are hard, experiment is dangerous") sentence.
An adage clearer than Cura te ipsum is hardly possible, for No man, when he hath lighted a candle, putteth it in a secret place. Indeed, the luminous saint Luke the Apostle (with lux, lucis ("light") as etyma for Luca, Lucam ) offered in Secundum Lucam both a pathway of light and a starting point for real cure.
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