Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Vanora Bennett

Author:Vanora Bennett [Bennett, Vanora]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Historical, cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9780007224937
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2006-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

12

They were hardly aware of me there, on a cushion in the corner of the parlor, under the window, in the fading light, with my embroidery. John, at his desk, was listening, enthralled, to Dr. Butts, on the bench, expounding his theories on the causes and treatment of plague in his reedy, high-pitched voice. I hadn’t minded at all that Dr. Butts couldn’t talk about anything except his knowledge of the human body. I’d hoped to learn so much from hearing England’s greatest physician discuss the science of medicine with my learned husband. But if I were honest, my first few experiences of listening to their professional conversations were proving a disappointment.

Perhaps my own education had been too much based on skepticism, on marrying the findings of learned men and books with the common sense of the simple wise women of the street. What had fascinated me in medicine was the examination of disease—the intellectual challenge of painstakingly assessing symptoms—and the gentle application of whatever minimal herbal remedies tradition suggested might calm and cure the patient, from aqua vitae to cleanse a wound or relieve the pain of an aching tooth, to herbal lotions and grease for smallpox and measles scabs.

Of course, those were simple skills, perhaps not sophisticated enough for the treatment of the kings and courtiers Dr. Butts dealt with. But some of the great theories that were taught at medical schools and occupied the minds of serious physicians of his stature, which I was now hearing for the first time, seemed uncannily like the superstitions of the odder salesmen on the street outside. They featured astrology, magic, and even, at times, the application of the unicorn horn sold by the likes of Mad Davy. I couldn’t take them seriously.

I stabbed a needle into the heart of a silk flower, puzzling over what was making me doubt all Dr. Butts’s knowledge. I didn’t have the experience to know whether the human pulse really beat in dactyls in infants and in iambs in the old, which he’d just told us had been the learned Pietro d’Abano’s contribution to medical knowledge, or whether there could be, as he said, nine simple varieties and twenty-seven complex varieties of musical rhythms in our pulses that made up part of the musica humana of our bodies, which could be described in terms of comparison with animals as, among other things, antlike, goatlike, or wormlike, and which changed as we aged. Yet, even if I didn’t know what caused plague, I couldn’t credit what Dr. Butts had just been saying about it either: that the particularities of one person’s horoscope, or the balance of the four bodily fluids within his body, contained the secret of whether or not he personally would get sick during an epidemic of plague, when other people all around were dying.

“It’s too dark for me to sew anymore,” I murmured. “If you’ll excuse me.” and I slipped away. Perhaps it was because they were so entranced with their ideas that they hardly noticed me go.

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