Avicennae
As an apothecary during the first Middle Ages, I treated croupy children, aching joints, gout, leprosy, elephantitis, and plague. None of these had an actual cure. The best I could do was to pestle some herbs into a salve, and send them on their way. I watched helpless as people died of everything that has since been solved by vaccines, antibiotics, and good surgeons. Life was hard. Fortunately, it was also brief. I did my best to discover new cures, but even when I succeeded, the established physicians called me a witch, and refused to adopt my methods.
I see that not much has changed. You are still calling us witches, and physician-splaining our craft to us. Unfortunately, health care in the second middle ages also has enemies. Who may comprehend what makes Paul-the-Pestilent-Ryan, or McConnell of Marble-Town such vociferous enemies of Health Care? Perhaps because the diseases which afflict them can never be cured?
Why would a man such as Mitch stand by to see others restored to health while he must go on enduring the amphibian scrofula that afflicts him? And who can blame Paul-the-Pestilent-Ryan, who woke one morning to find that his humors had been replaced with beeswax–for depriving others of the rosy bloom of a quickening which he no longer enjoys? I’ll say nothing of your anti-vaxxers. What’s with that? I would have crawled face-down through the cesspits to provide my patients with your smallpox vaccine!
With our roads beset by bandits, and the niceties of Roman society long since faded from memory, I faced my own nay sayers–from jealous physicians, who couldn’t cure the false dropsy of a hypochondriac, to noblemen, who believed that medicine would be wasted on anyone but themselves. Now that your own streets are raining bullets, and stupid, uneducated miscreants opine from their hovels and their mansions against people of other complexions, who can blame you for overindulging? I know the cause!–Your humors are way out of balance!
In my day, in order to balance the humors, I dosed my patients with what-ever seemed to work at the time. It might not have cured anyone, or even prolonged their lives, but it did relieve their suffering. Happily, my most effective elixir for creating this balance is tinctura opii crocata, also known as tinctura opii benzoica, or, if you watch a lot of BBC movies–laudanum.
Largely unavailable in your pharmacies, the physic I brought back from my travels will come in handy as you protest, boycott, and vote your way back to a decent society, or suffer through a bout with measles you picked up from the child of an anti vaxxer. In a sincere effort to endow you with the tools you need to come out the other end of this dreadful dystrumpian curse with some of your humors intact, I provide my own secret recipe for the magical elixir.
Read more at, The Dystrumpian Almanac
