This is a most unusual book. I guess the genre it fits into most comfortably is Memoir, since it is a first-person account of the twenty years that author Victoria Sweet spent as a physician at San Francisco’s Laguna Honda Hospital.
For those who don’t know, Laguna Honda hospital was founded in 1866 during the California Gold-Rush as an Almshouse, that is to say a charitable Institution which provided housing and care to the poorest and neediest people. Dr. Sweet’s patients were the sickest patients, the rejects from the County Hospital. They often had mental illnesses. They often abused drugs. And they often had complex medical conditions that required devoted nursing.
What makes this book so interesting is that Dr. Sweet’s life story is interwoven with her attempts to use the long-forgotten natural medicine of the Middle Ages, as filtered through the brilliant mind of Abbess Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179.)
For example, when Dr. Sweet was confronted by a patient with a massive bed-sore, she used Hildegard’s concept of Viriditas to heal her. This is how she described her patient’s condition ~
Terry’s bedsore was the worst I’d ever seen. It was huge, enormous and deep. It went from the middle of her back all the way down to her tailbone and it spanned both of her sit bones. The skin was completely gone, of course, but so were the fat and the muscles that cover the spine. In their place was an unidentifiable mass of decayed and decaying and infected tissue from the failed skin graft, and at the bottom of this wide, deep hole I could see bone—Terry’s spine (p. 105.)
Terry’s bedsore was terrifying, because her body had lost its wholeness, its natural protection. A healthy body covered in skin is impervious to fluids and germs. Extra protections come in the form of fat under the skin which cushions the muscles, the muscles which protect the bones, and the bones which protect the spinal cord. Terry had nothing to protect herself from viruses or bacteria.
Because Terry’s bedsore was so substantial, it would take years to heal. And so, Dr. Sweet asked herself, what would Hildegard do? Unlike today, when doctors tend to see our bodies as machines, Hildegard thought of them as gardens, which needed tending. And so, she concluded that Hildegard, the gardener-doctor, would remove obstructions to Terry’s Viriditas, or Terry’s natural ability to heal. She would remove the mass of dead tissue, every single piece of it. She would remove any pressure on Terry’s body, which meant that Terry had to spend her entire time face-down on a gurney. Anything that interfered with the circulation of her blood, such as nicotine, would have to be removed. Dirt, unkemptness, stale clothes, unnecessary medications, fear depression and hopelessness, all of these were in the way and would have to be removed.
It took two and a half years, but eventually Terry was able to fly to Arkansas to spend the rest of her life living with her brother. People in the Middle Ages would have called Terry’s recovery a miracle. But, as we can see from the pages of this volume, it required a lot of caring, a lot of keen observation and a great deal of hard work.
Five stars for a thought-provoking and inspiring book.
