CARE
Warm browns and wainscoting soften overhead lighting and mute the beeps and clatters. The standard smudged, wan waiting room is replaced by a Family Room, comfortingly arranged, matching, softened.
We quickly learn this is anomalous; this section was built with an unusually abundant budget and everywhere else in the hospital we find the clean but echoing, tired, unsustaining mazes that trap all visitors (well and unwell alike) in a circuitous and hard-edged reality warp.
I dread entrapment in that warp. My fear of sickness may well be more a fear of entering an institutional system than of whatever suffering my internal systems may experience – a world where, ensconced in the most comfortable corner of the building and tended by a highly capable and personable team, an urgent procedure may be delayed and delayed and the CNA certainly has no idea why – nor the nurse, nor the charge nurse, nor the cardiac nurse, nor perhaps the hospitalist, even if she has a good guess.
Don’t quote me – I wasn’t there – but the earliest recorded medical professions, in ancient Mesopotamia, generally fell into two categories: those who treated maladies with empirical training and those who were trained in magic. All of them, apparently, began their studies with the 10-plus-years required to become a cuneiform scribe, after which they could study medicine; and all of them, apparently, understood that the suffering they would diagnose and treat was caused by offending some deity.1 Which of course has been well proven in modern days (although the deities have been renamed Balance, Bowels, Blood Cells…).
Healing practitioners go back as far as history, and all over the world; hospitals came much later. Around 400 BC we have the ancient Greek, Hippocrates, earning his title as “father of modern medicine,”2 but at that time Greek practitioners of a scientific approach generally visited patients in their homes. Patients traveled to and stayed at temples to the god Asclepius throughout the Roman Empire – but they applied a magical and mystical approach to healing.3
A few hundred years into the Common Era, medical science fizzled out in Europe, where “thousands of monastic hospitals … sprang up” but were based in the religious emphasis on caring for the sick and dying. Eventually the study/science of medicine had a new heyday in the Islamic Golden Age, with a major hospital opening in Baghdad in 805 CE – and here we’re finally starting to see hospital systems much more as we know them today.4
Bimaristan, infirmary, valetudinarium, xenodocheion3 – but “hospital,” from the same Latin source as hospitality, hospice, and hotel: “hospit-, hospes ‘guest, host,’"5 is where we wander today , winding between white mazes and brown armchairs, lost somewhere between the “guest” and the “host,” waiting for the next signpost in my father’s… care.
CARRY
in a maze of white and gray geometry strewn with other humans I learn to turn to the right at the picture of a green hill endless cubicles of time carry me up and down floor 2, floor 4, star 1 – this elevator is needed for a patient – only yesterday I lay on rain-softened earth beneath an old and golden walnut tree its fingers warm against a field of winter’s truest new blue, its fallen leaves holding me entirely as we flew through space one leaf came with me, caught somewhere in my left hip now leaking yellow and blue and ground and sky down my leg bones, over my instep, between the toes, to soothe my sole and whisper something wordless and old with every step I take against this hard, long floor
detail of sculpture by Michael Benisty at Wilbur Hot Springs
1 World History Encyclopedia, “Medicine in Ancient Mesopotamia” Joshua J. Mark January 25, 2023 https://www.worldhistory.org/article/687/medicine-in-ancient-mesopotamia/
2 PubMed, “Hippocrates of Kos, the father of clinical medicine, and Asclepiades of Bithynia, the father of molecular medicine. Review” Christos Yapijakis Jul-Aug 2009 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19567383/
3 PubMed, “The evolution of the hospital from antiquity to the end of the middle ages” Louise Cilliers and Francois Pieter Retief December, 2002 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/9081040_The_evolution_of_the_hospital_from_antiquity_to_the_end_of_the_middle_ages
4 Wikipedia, “History of Medicine” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_medicine