Category: Archive

LIVING BONE-DEEP IN A CYBERSPACE WORLD

“Bone is the hardest and driest of all parts of the human body, the most earthy, and cold, and, with the sole exception of the teeth, most lacking in sensation. God, the supreme maker of things, rightly made its substance of this temperament so as to supply the entire body with a kind of foundation. For what walls and beams provide in houses, poles in tents, and keels and ribs in ships, the substance of bones provides in the fabric of man…” (Vesalius, A. On the Fabric of the Human Body: A Translation of De corporis humani fabrica by William Frank Richardson. Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine.)

 

The poetic description above came from the famous work, De corporis humani fabrica libri septem (Seven books on the fabric of the human body) published in the year 1543. It was written by the Belgian physician Andreas Vesalius who studied and worked at the two foremost medical schools of his day, in Montpellier and in Paris. In his own time Vesalius’s medical breakthroughs were refuted by his contemporaries because he dared to challenge claims made by the great Greek physician, Galen, whose ideas had dominated medicine since 200 C.E. Today Vesalius is still often introduced to students in Western medical schools as the father of modern medicine, although, I am sure, few modern doctors have ever read a single sentence of his writings.

The words and drawings in this powerful medical text managed to combine medical science, art and religious philosophy in a seamless way. In the world of Vesalius, feelings and subjective interpretations were never severed from the science of medicine.

 

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Living bone.

A LITTLE BIT OF POISON

“Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, 

Think I’ll go and eat worms.

Big fat juicy ones,

Eensie weensy squeensy ones,

See how they wiggle and squirm.

Chomp off their heads

Squeeze out the juice

And throw their tails away

Nobody knows how I survive

On worms three times a day.”

 

Whenever my children had a hard day at school and came home with the weight of modern expectations squarely on their shoulders, we broke the tension by chanting this popular children’s rhyme while play-acting the depth of their misery. It became our mantra with which to banish the stresses of everyday suburban life at the kitchen table, and to give our immune systems a fair chance to recover from the knocks and needs so typical of life in an affluent Western society.

Recently, when I read the research about the effect of excessive hygiene on our immune systems and the use of ‘worm egg capsules’ as treatment, I couldn’t help smiling. The irony in this clinical use of worm parasites as a so-called breakthrough in the treatment of allergies and auto-immune diseases is quite amusing. It seems that in the end we are going to ”…go eat worms…” again to survive our modern life style.

 

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A little poison goes a long way.

 OF WOOD AND WORM

 “For as physicians, when they seek to give

 Young boys the nauseous wormwood,

 First do touch the brim around the cup with the sweet juice

 And yellow of the honey, in order that the thoughtless age of boyhood

 Be cajoled as far as the lips, and meanwhile swallow down

 The wormwood’s bitter draught, and, though befooled,

 Be yet not merely duped, but rather thus

 Grow strong again with recreated health.”

Lucretius, On the Nature of Things.

 

The name of the family farm on my father’s side is ‘Wildealslaagte’. The name means ‘valley where wildeals grows’. Here, narrow shady valleys are engraved into a vast landscape of grey hills speckled with white sheep and even whiter stones. From these valleys, shrubs of African wormwood or wildeals send a Delphian fragrance into the summer air. The hardy wildeals bushes, with their woody stems and silver leaves, are the oldest and best known medicinal plants in Africa. Artemisia afra, the African version of wormwood, grows right through Africa, from the Cedarberg Mountains in South Africa to as far north as Ethiopia.

As children we were well aware of the plant’s medicinal qualities. We would respectfully avoid damaging the plants, but could not resist breaking a twig or two to release the sticky sweet oil, which, to a child’s imagination, was reminiscent of menthol toffees. When we had a cold we would roll leaves and put them into our noses, usually with great results. The leaves were also very effective at stopping our feet from sweating in our shoes during long walks through the veld. Most impressive was how well the leaves would clean our cuts and scratches.

 

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Of wood and worm.

WATER AND FIRE

“I am the poison-dripping dragon,

Who is everywhere and can be cheaply had.

That upon which I rest, and that which rest upon me,

Will be found within me by those who pursue their investigations

In accordance with the rules of the Art.

My water and fire destroy and put together;

From my body you may extract the green lion and the red.

But if you do not have exact knowledge of me,

You will destroy your five senses with my fire. “

(Aurelia Occulta from Theatrum Chemicum, 1613)

 

Over thousands of years, our system has adapted to change by designing feedback processes which use specific biphasic influences, – influences that can be both beneficial and harmful to our system. This means that our system is able to use a substance or situation that is harmful under certain conditions for its own benefit. The process is called hormesis. Hormetic interaction with substances and influences in the outer world have become part of wide-ranging interactive networks that have developed over time between our system and specific outer influences

In the West, great scholars and medical philosophers, from Galen to Paracelsus, Isaac Newton to CG Jung, have often defined health according to the symbolic and practical principles of hormetic dynamics. To them the concept of hormesis is part of the health philosophies of all cultures; natural philosophies which carry the ‘practical truths about life and health’. In Eastern countries particularly, these practical realities have been integral to a traditional understanding of healing, and today people in these cultures still find it is easier to integrate non-linear models such as quantum mechanics or biophysics into modern medical research, especially where it involves laser technology and the energy fields that are related to meridians and acupuncture.

 

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Water and fire.

NOURISHED BY OUR OWN ASH

Hormesis – the process where a small amount of something has a different or opposite effect than a larger amount – is an inherent part of the organisation inside our body cells (see A Little Poison Goes a Long Way). One of the best examples of hormesis on a cellular level relates to the modern craze for antioxidants. We all, whether scientists, journalists or simply ordinary folks who are at the receiving end of new information, suffer from a human weakness for any novel strategy to contain the unknown, especially that part of the unknown dressed in the robes of death and disease. At the moment antioxidants fill this role perfectly.

Antioxidants are all about countering free radicals. Free radicals are the new gangsters in the medical neighbourhood. Modern illnesses, food and chemical substances such as coffee or tobacco are all now evaluated in terms of the amount of free radicals that are produced. At last our modern health-religion has a devil and a saviour neatly packaged in scientific language – a package that sells extremely well in the media as well as the drug stores. Plants and herbs are regularly tested and every month it is another one that, according to its anti-oxidant abilities, becomes the consumer’s answer to all health problems. This ignores the fact that most plants would in any case have lots of antioxidants as it is after all a plant’s natural survival strategy.

 

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Nourished by our own ash