It is not a common occurrence to see a work of fiction cited in this publication. I have nothing against it, mind you; one of my academic degrees is in English literature. It’s simply that I don’t often happen upon novels that are both well written and whose authors are well-versed in natural history, the history of science (including medicine), or a similarly related field of study.
“From these things therefore it is clear that the city-state is a natural growth, and that man is by nature an animal that lives in a polis, and a man that is by nature and not merely by fortune citiless is either low in the scale of humanity or above it […]” – Aristotle, “Politics” […]
With a global pandemic uprooting most every basic element of modern social life that so many of us have taken for granted throughout our entire lives, it is not surprising that some are looking back into the past to learn what those who lived in L.P. Hartley’s metaphorical “foreign country” where they “do things differently” did when faced with such epidemiological challenges. Many doing so are naturally looking to the early twentieth century and its influenza pandemic; however travelling a bit farther back may be an even more enlightening journey.
It’s the age-old balance – pain and pleasure, sorrow and happiness, death and life; so many of the things of the world which bring about one are inextricably linked to the other, and even sometimes one and the same. For millennia, folk healers and herbalists, whose spheres of activity have developed, expanded, and diversified into those of physicians and pharmacists, while also still existing in modernized forms of traditional practice, as well as fields of more academic study such as ethnobotany, have sought for treatments and cures in the world of plants. And, in reference to the aforementioned balance, some of the plants so used, when prepared or employed differently, hold the power to take as well as preserve life.