Perspectives on Healing

Ah, so many questions, and these have been asked for thousands of years. Two great women who both lived in the 12th century had vastly different ideas on the provenance of healing, or where healing came from. One was incredibly religious: Hildegard von Bingen in Germany promoted health for the young women who came to her abbey as grace from God, and though her “toolbox” she included plant remedies and country know-how, and she attributed true healing to the Divine and sickness to Original Sin (and received the Church’s approval for her teachings).

At roughly the same time, Trotula (Trota) of Salerno, Italy, taught in her matter-of-fact scientific way that the young women attending the clinics at the University of Salerno could heal their illnesses using hygiene, nutritious diet, and plant remedies. I would love to have gotten Hildegard and Trotula together at a dinner table and peppered them each with questions about health; it would have been a vibrant exchange on ideas about prayer, God, herbs, and Mother Nature, and would likely have included a fair amount of talk about women’s rights, reproductive mysteries, and the power of a supportive community in the process of individual healing.

Where Does Healing Come From?

I ask all these questions not to promote one over the other, but to explore the nuances of confidence, the influence of belief, and the effect of chemistry on human anatomy. Healing involves all of these, it seems. And what—for those of us who serve as herbalists, midwives, nurses, or health professionals—is our role in it?

Those of us who are healing arts practitioners must grapple with every one of these possible origins of healing and employ each as it is needed in every case. Part of our responsibility is to support the patient in his or her beliefs of recovery and wellness, and part of our duty is to empower him or her to be the healer, to reclaim the confidence required to pursue health, especially if that healing power has been given away to a doctor, a nurse, a shaman, a divinity, or even a plant.

Part of our jobs as healing arts practitioners is to funnel that power back into the person so that health ownership happens and the patient is invested with the self-confidence to pursue a healthy quality of life regardless of where their culture, family, religion or medical paradigm tells them their healing will come from.

I hope you have been enjoying this series, and will follow along to the next part.