The Dermis Probe by Idries Shah

Author:Idries Shah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ISF Publishing
Published: 2016-10-29T04:00:00+00:00

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BREAD, MICE AND…

Keep bread away from mice – and Sufi work from scholars.

Saying

The Legend of the Hidden Physician

IN A CERTAIN country there was a physician. He lived at a time when medical skill was, in most places, at a low level. He decided, because of this, to make his knowledge available in the farthest west of the continent in which he lived. In that land, called Gharb, medical knowledge was almost nonexistent, though in every other way its inhabitants had developed a high culture.

Being wise as well as learned, our physician made extensive inquiries about the people of Gharb before he went there. He discovered, among other things, that there was a tendency among the Gharbs to possess themselves of anything useful that they might hear about, and use it in a destructive manner. Certain despots, again, were known to get hold of valuable facts of knowledge, and preserve them for their own private use.

He therefore caused a rumor to circulate to the effect that there was a doctor, in a far-off land, who knew the remedy to many ailments. Many people set off in search of him, mostly for the wrong reasons: for they were citizens of Gharb. Because of their eagerness (some say greed), certain of these travelers actually believed that they had found the “wonderful doctor.” Sometimes they met him but did not know it. They then thought that their malady had been healed by some other means; sometimes they thought that their sickness had “cured itself.”

What was really happening was that the doctor, concerned only with healing and preservation, lived incognito among his patients.

He also had representatives in other countries. These people said that they had cures for various diseases, but that they were very expensive. There was, in fact, no charge, and the medicines cost nothing at all. How, then, was the money spent?

It covered the traveling expenses of the doctor, who often had to journey personally from a great distance to examine a patient, generally without the patient’s knowledge, and prescribe a course of treatment. Because, for necessary reasons, the procedure was concealed, the patients often assumed that the time taken for the medicine to work was something to do with the relationship between the body and the prescription. In reality, of course, the passage of time corresponded to the period which it took the doctor to travel to his patients.

Imagine, now, what happened when this doctor died. All the misinformed intermediaries continued to talk about the distant cure, the time and the cost. They did not know that another physician, nominated by the first, succeeded him and carried on the treatments in a way suited to changed conditions and his own individuality. He did not always choose the same representatives or their successors.

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