HONEY, MUD, MAGGOTS AND OTHER MEDICAL...
An artist friend says the most pernicious disease afflicting humankind is “hardening of the categories,” that seemingly irresistible urge to put things in their proper places and draw clear lines between science and art, natural and unnatural, matter and spirit. But scientists in particular know that nature just won’t stay put in such confined spaces; the most important discoveries tend to come from the stuff that oozes out from the sides; biology spilling into physics (and vice versa), imagination merging with mathematics, computers giving insights into the nature of human consciousness.
Two new books take obvious delight in blurring well-established boundaries between subjects usually relegated to the opposite ends of the intellectual spectrum and in illuminating realms on either side.
Robert Root-Bernstein, physiologist and MacArthur “genius” fellow, teams up with his historian wife Michele in “Honey, Mud, Maggots and Other Medical Marvels” to reveal just how tenuous remains the dividing line between “old wives’ tales” and modern medicine. Roald Hoffmann, Nobel prize-winning chemist and poet, collaborates with Shira Leibowitz Schmidt, an Israeli American student of religion, to explore common ground between chemistry and Jewish tradition in “Old Wine, New Flasks.” Both are brave books that have the courage to make connections that will likely get them in trouble with those who would rather keep science safe in its self-contained sphere.
If you believe the Root-Bernsteins, for example, you might think that the very latest medical marvels include maggot therapy, bloodletting and urine drinking and that the best advice physicians can offer their patients may well be: Let them eat dirt! Need to clean a wound? Let a moose lick it. Reattach a scalp? Call in the leeches. Disinfect an open sore? Try honey or pus.
The authors aren’t advising us to forsake modern medicine for prescriptions of shamans or witch doctors. Most folk treatments don’t work. Many are harmful, and it can be fatal to rely on charms and potions while ignoring what the doctor has to order.
At the same time, Grandma (not to mention our ape ancestors) knew a thing or two about treating what ails us, and we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the medical know-how that chance and evolution unearthed over many millenniums. “To ignore this fecund source of knowledge and practice is . . . foolish,” the authors write. Medical trials, in a sense, have been going on for thousands of years. And today, practitioners around the world are beginning to resurrect such frequently maligned treatments as mineral baths, mud therapy and electric shock.
Wisely, the Root-Bernsteins limit their examples to treatments “amply validated by recent medical practice.” They set the stage with cautionary tales of now common practices that were once dismissed as bunk because of their origins in folk medicine. In 1798, the Society of London refused to publish physician Edward Jenner’s discovery that people infected with cowpox did not contract the much more deadly smallpox, a finding that eventually led to vaccines. In the 1850s, the idea that mosquitoes could carry yellow fever was dismissed as superstition. More recently, a potent anti-cancer agent, taxol, was discovered among the natural pharmaceuticals long used by Native Americans.
A less palatable prescription involves using maggots to clean dead tissue from wounds, something the little critters can do better in some cases than can any surgical instrument. Surgeons call this practice “biosurgery” to make it sound less disgusting. This is not something you want to try at home. As the authors point out, for every species of maggot that feeds on dying tissue, there is another that prefers to feed on living flesh. “Unfortunately,” they write, “a number of these flies and their maggots look very much the same.” A further disadvantage is that maggots, like leeches, have “a tendency to crawl out of reach.”
Similar caveats apply to other remedies found in “Honey, Mud, Maggots and Other Medical Marvels.” Recent studies by doctors from India to Buenos Aires suggest that sugar paste and honey can work better than traditional antiseptics and antibiotics for certain kinds of wounds, including infections from open heart surgery. But commercial sugars and honeys are not sterile and may do more harm than good.
In the same way, dirt seems to be the ultimate health food. Our ancestors ate clay long before they thought to make it into pots. Indeed, everything we eat--therefore everything we are--is ultimately dirt, mixed with sunlight and water. Just when you thought it was safe to eat dirt by the shovelful, however, the Root-Bernsteins point out that dirt eating can be correlated with mineral deficiencies, although it’s not clear which is cause and which is effect. Worse, dirt is addictive.
Whatever the ultimate value of these cures, the stories themselves in “Honey, Mud, Maggots and Other Medical Marvels” make fascinating journeys into medical history. The authors rely on impressive and often original research that covers every corner of the ancient and modern world. There’s also a great deal of good clear science explaining the chemistry and physiology behind folk practices.
Their writing is serviceable, if not always elegant, sometimes straining at cuteness and the kind of humor that makes teenagers’ eyes roll. “Far from absurd,” the authors write, “bloodletting is proving itself to be a bloody good remedy.” Groan. And the stories all follow the same pattern, which gets repetitive: Humanity discovers cure. Humanity abandons cure for more enlightened methods. Humanity rediscovers cure.
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Yet folksiness may be just the prescription for what is sometimes disgusting subject matter, and repetition gets the message across loud and clear: People have been slathering themselves with mud and honey, soaking in mineral baths, bleeding themselves dry, eating dirt and licking their wounds for millenniums. There must be something to it, some reason why “fresh pus tastes sweet,” as the authors tell us, and “blood is the sort of salty-sweet flavor that most of us find appealing.”
As in modern medicine, folk remedies become dangerous when people view them as all-purpose miracle cures that will fix everything from cancer to insomnia, insanity to gout. In the old days, it was bloodletting and mud. Today it’s Prozac and Melatonin. Folk wisdom has a lot to offer, but in the end, the authors conclude, it “must compete with the best that medical practice has to offer.”
Hoffmann and Schmidt, on the other hand, take a Talmudic approach to breaking down barriers between modern science and ancient wisdom. In “Old Wine, New Flasks,” they openly challenge the prevailing distinctions between chemistry and religion, natural and unnatural, pure and impure. The book opens with an appropriate ancient Jewish story: The Lord hurls Truth to the ground, where it smashes into a thousand pieces.
The business of science and religion, as well as art, is to reassemble the jigsaw puzzle. No single discipline adequately captures the richness of the world. “Religion and science are both attempts by human beings to come to terms with the beautiful but quirky universe,” they write.
The complexity of the book mirrors the complexity of truth itself. Bits of science and Jewish lore are tossed together with poems and diagrams of chemical structure and correspondence between the authors and colleagues, e-mail discussions, scripture, basic lessons on physics, law and art. The authors don’t apologize for this lack of focus, though readers may find it frustrating. “We tell stories, inherently digressive the way real life is,” they write. Their digressions are enchanting, but sometimes they play in too many different keys at once.
Still, some strong commonalities emerge. Both chemistry and Judaism, for example, deal uniquely with the stuff of everyday life. Chemistry is the science of molecules, of which we are made: neither vast, like the cosmos, nor so infinitesimal as to be irrelevant, like quarks. Similarly, Judaism concerns itself with mundane matters of everyday life, what people eat, drink, wear and do. Both arrive at the truth through open debate by weighing evidence, citing previous analyses, arguing, coming to temporary conclusions. Both explain and interpret real life as we know it.
As an admitted fan of Hoffmann’s work, I like his treatment of certain subjects better in other books, especially his recent “The Same and Not the Same.” For example, both books explore the distinction between natural and unnatural. Why do people prefer “natural” cotton to “unnatural” nylon? Hoffmann asks. Both are hybrids of natural processes and human engineering. Cotton comes from plants but is chemically transformed by everything from pesticides to brighteners before it winds up in your socks. Nylon, on the other hand, is made in factories from long chains of molecules that come ultimately from petroleum. Petroleum is cooked up deep underground from the fossilized remains of plants. It’s hard to say which is more “natural.” “They all began life as a seed,” Hoffmann and Schmidt write. This nonreligious reviewer finds what molecules have to tell us about these differences more revealing and original than what scripture has to say.
Judaism, like science, concerns itself with the difference between natural and unnatural. For example, there is a controversy concerning whether the fringes on the four-cornered garment worn by Jewish males can be made of synthetic fiber or whether married women wear wigs to cover their natural hair. Ironically, some of these wigs are made from natural hair, though not the hair of the wearer. Hoffmann the chemist concludes that the difference between natural and synthetic is entirely spiritual and aesthetic.
Similarly, our perceptions of “purity” seem more arbitrary than scientific. What is it that makes a mixture inherently tainted? “Only change is eternal,” writes Hoffmann the poet. “Everything else is tense, poised between pure and impure, ambiguous, therefore interesting. Alive.”
Alas, some connections seem rather a stretch. Does the difference between right- and left-handed molecules, which are mirror images of each other, really have anything to do with the instruction in Deuteronomy that judges must not deviate “either to the right or to the left?” Yet even some rather tedious stretches of correspondence in the book are studded with gems. Here’s an example from a protracted e-mail conversation with a biblical discussion group wondering how Moses sweetened the water that was too bitter for the children of Israel to drink: “Jews, Jews--what a people!” one writer exclaims, “One person asks a simple question, about bitter waters. So what do you get? Three opinions from authorities who couldn’t agree two thousand years ago, interpreted by four people who won’t listen to each other today.”
This lament could apply equally to some contemporary scientific dialogues. As Hoffmann puts it: “Science and religion are both ways of trying to . . . find meaning in that world’s beauty and terror.”
Curiously, 20th century physics has come to the same conclusion as the authors of these two boundary-breaking books. Truth is many-faceted, requiring many different, sometimes mutually exclusive, perspectives. Part mud and maggots, part MRI; part chemistry, part Jewish lore. As the founder of quantum mechanics, Danish physicist Niels Bohr, put it (perhaps apocryphally): “The opposite of a shallow truth is false. But the opposite of a deep truth is also true.”
