Aug 08, 2007
No Remedy
During the 14th century the bubonic plague struck with devastating results, wiping out half of the population of Europe and much of Asia. Called the Black Death, it was caused by an infectious bacterium which was spread by flea-infested rats.
I can remember as a child watching a movie about that time and being struck by one scene in particular: a big man, all dressed in black, drives a cart from house to house, picking up the dead and carrying them off for burial. I remember thinking, “How is he getting away with this?” Here is an incredibly bad bug, killing one out of every two people, and this guy is going into infected households, and touching infected bodies, and somehow still managing to put in a sixteen hour day!
Since the fourteenth century, we have learned a lot about bubonic plague. We fully understand the bug that causes it: what it looks like, how it lives, how it travels, how it affects the human body, and how to kill it, which we have proven successful at doing. Yet we know almost nothing about the man driving that cart and how and why he lived on. While we have conscientiously studied the half of Europe that died we have blithely ignored the half that survived.
Doctors now say, “The survivors just had greater resistance; they had natural immunity.” But what does that mean? Was it God’s will? Were they born with it? Were they just lucky? Or could it have been something in their diet, or their manner of thinking, or the way they processed their emotions, or how they prayed, or perhaps some combination of any or all of these factors? More importantly, as we come to better understand the survivor’s experience, can we successfully transfer it to others?
In fundamental ways, Western medical science over the past few hundred years has assiduously avoided addressing these questions. We have enthusiastically dissected the dead while showing little interest in the living. We have stayed away from questions of individual immunity and natural healing while focusing our intellectual energies and research on defeating specific disease symptoms, battle by battle, with an increasingly complex array of hardcare weaponry. Rather than a softcare investigation into the nature of wellness—How do some people manage to stay healthy without resorting to doctors or medicines?—we have chosen to wage a hardcare war on the real and imagined agents of disease.
The hardcare medical model claims that every ailment has a specific causative agent (the bad guy) and for every such agent we can and will eventually find a specific remedy (the magic bullet). It is a model that totally ignores the individual involved — is she under stress, is she a happy person, is she motivated to go on living, does she express her emotions, how is her family life, what was it like growing up, is she loved — these questions are dismissed as irrelevant. All that matters is figuring out which bug is causing the problem and then administering the proper remedy.
And yet, we harbor flu viruses for most of our lives without catching colds, and we are exposed to carcinogens on a regular basis without developing cancer. Half of the population of 14th century Europe contacted the plague but did not die. There is more to it than “you catch the bug and it makes you sick,” and much more to it than relying on a “magic bullet” to make things better.
The more to it resides somehow and somewhere within all human beings. Though it can not be captured in a bottle and measured out in clear dosages, nor carefully produced in a laboratory and shot into the body with pointed precision, it is more potent than any such remedies, and can surely heal any and all wounds.
While it is reassuring to know that we now have a cure for the bubonic plague, we must remember that the man driving the cart had one six hundred years ago.
