This author… <3
— Writing about her experience in college, and encountering the slow food movement for the first time (snap shots of the pages below), made me reminisce about the effect her book, The God’s Hotel, had on me my third year in college.
The God’s Hotel, named after the fact that almshouses used to be called Hotel-Dieu in France, as the first public hospitals were run by “men of God,” and was about her twenty years as a nurse in the last almshouse in North America, Laguna Hospital —
It changed my world.
It reads much like a cautionary tale of what has happened since doctors no longer are about the work up, or giving their patients a thorough diagnostic assessment, because the new healthcare systems in place have largely replaced good medicine, which takes time, with efficiency, and are sacrificing quality patient care as a result.
I remember visiting my dad during a college break, reading her book, and deciding I wasn’t going to attend my last semester in college. I mean… I was always looking for a way out of formal education, lol. But I was very much still stuck in this mental model that the only way to achieve something for myself, was through a formal degree — even though, as soon as I graduated college, the first thing I thought to do was to get as far away from academia as I could. I was yearning for what in restrospect, was probably my response to the third line in me still at play: I wanted “real world experiences,” and so I started working as a baker in a grocery store, and a neuroscience lab in the mornings.
But for my last college semester, I found the closest approximation to this book that I could — I decided to study abroad on a public health tract, so I could encounter different medical systems across the world. It ended up being yet another existential disaster — I met such interesting, bright people my age who were from top universities and so on, but it was nothing close to the experience, those subtle threads of real world-applied mysticism, that I was searching for.
It was the kind of thing where a book changes your life, and you are left hungry, wanting more of the same, but haven’t the faintest clue how to continue in the line of… whatever it is that has affected you so deeply.
So I continued on, hungry, for years to come.
A couple nights ago, I thought back on Victoria Sweet, while watching the show Outlander1 which I’d read the first novel of in the very long series.
As it turns out Sweet wrote a new book, Slow Medicine, and I ordered it immediately.
I love period pieces. And particularly I love reading and seeing renditions of historical practices of medicine that I guess you could say pull from pagan belief, such as the expert use of herbs. Just a random fascination I’ve long held, but have never been able to exactly place.2
Martin Shaw is another author I’m getting back into again. I pay for his substack, but I find I just don’t read the hyper religious stuff he writes about, like his fascination with Christ as mystic I think is the general drift. But he’s a mythologist, a poet — and unlike most mythology which I’ve never been able to get into, such as the likes of Joseph Campbell, which always seems way too cerebral for me (and, not coincidentally, he taught at my small liberal arts college for 30 years… goes to show the kind of environment that I both loved, and was itching to rid myself of as soon as I got there)— Shaw’s views mostly come from Celtic myth, and more importantly, through his own very much lived, deep connection to nature. The two books I’m most excited about: one is from four years living in the English countryside of Devon by tent. Literally, apparently, just camping out for a number of years, removing himself as much as possible from contemporary, civilized existence. And the other, after nearly twenty years of taking people into the wilderness for a rite of passage, a kind of vision quest, or vigil.3
Anyway, I was really reminded of this fascination of mine while watching Outlander, when the main protagonist, Claire, volunteers as a healer (who’s trained as a nurse — the whole storyline is she travels back in time from 1948, through a basically a stone henge, to the early 18th century, in the Scottish Highlands4) in an 18th century charity hospital. The matron was Hildegard of Bingen (who actually, I believe lived more in the 12th century), and who functions as the inspiration for a background story line in The God’s Hotel. Bingen practiced Humoral medicine, after Hippocrates, was an herbalist, composer, and thought the physician’s job was akin to a gardener’s — tending the soil of the patient’s inner landscape, so to speak. So Sweet pursued a Master’s in the history medieval medicine, then a PhD studying (& applying at Laguna Hospital!) Hildegard’s methods.
But something about encountering the way Claire would use urinology, for example — yes, the study of urine, literally tasting the urine of her patients — as well as the appearance of Hildegard, rustled my memory of Victoria Sweet and her book. 5
Then, a few nights ago, I responded to Monique’s story about her book, and how I used Queen Anne’s Lace, or Wild Carrot Flower, as contraception.