Hydra's Heads and Medusa's Blood 29
encoded in DNA spell out the unfolding. At successive but still limited
levels of understanding, each of these beliefs tries to account for the
beautifully bizarre metamorphosis. And if some savage told us of a mag-
ical worm that built a little windowless house, slept there a season, then
one day emerged and flew away as a jeweled bird, we'd laugh at such
superstition if we'd never seen a butterfly.
The healer's job has always been to release something not understood,
to remove obstructions (demons, germs, despair) between the sick pa-
tient and the force of life driving obscurely toward wholeness. The
means may be direct—the psychic methods mentioned above—or indi-
rect: Herbs can be used to stimulate recovery; this tradition extends
from prehistoric wisewomen through the Greek herbal of Dioscorides
and those of Renaissance Europe, to the prevailing drug therapies of the
present. Fasting, controlled nutrition, and regulation of living habits to
avoid stress can be used to coax the latent healing force from the sick
body; we can trace this approach back from today's naturopaths to Galen
and Hippocrates. Attendants at the healing temples of ancient Greece
and Egypt worked to foster a dream in the patient that would either
start the curative process in sleep or tell what must be done on awaken-
ing. This method has gone out of style, but it must have worked fairly
well, for the temples were filled with plaques inscribed by grateful pa-
trons who'd recovered. In fact, this mode was so esteemed that
Aesculapius, the legendary doctor who originated it, was said to have
been given two vials filled with the blood of Medusa, the snaky-haired
witch-queen killed by Perseus. Blood from her left side restored life,
while that from her right took it away—and that's as succinct a descrip-
tion of the tricky art of medicine as we're likely to find.
The more I consider the origins of medicine, the more I'm convinced
that all true physicians seek the same thing. The gulf between folk ther-
apy and our own stainless-steel version is illusory. Western medicine
springs from the same roots and, in the final analysis, acts through the
same little-understood forces as its country cousins. Our doctors ignore
this kinship at their—and worse, their patients'—peril. All worthwhile
medical research and every medicine man's intuition is part of the same
quest for knowledge of the same elusive healing energy.
Failed Healing in Bone
As an orthopedic surgeon, I often pondered one particular breakdown of
that energy, my specialty's major unsolved problem—nonunion of frac-
tures. Normally a broken bone will begin to grow together in a few