> 📗 The following story stands alone and can be read without any knowledge of my prior works, but does serve as a prequel to [Embaphium](https://eleanorkonik.com/embaphium) %% ( [[2021-07-28 Embaphium (DRAFT)]] ) %%. A wasting disease was an ignoble end for the village apothecary, and the utter uselessness of the local priests made it incalculably worse. As Kuria and her brother carried their mother's carefully wrapped corpse to the village dakhma for interment, they passed by the Temple of the Gardener, the Temple of the Engineer, and the Temple of the Architect. "Why do the gods care about corn and carts but not people?" her brother asked, and Kuria, Priestess-mage in service to the Architect, could only say grimly, "I don't know, Migiri, but I intend to find out." ## Afterword While most of the _doctors_ in science fiction I've seen tend to have a basis in reality — Simon Tam's strong medical ethics and sense of sacrifice on behalf of his sister are both very believable, and [the crankiness from Star Trek is practically legendary](https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/star-trek-doctors-ranked-by-crankiness/) — when you add magic to the mix, _healers_ suddenly feel like a fever-dream. In most stories where medical care plays a role, the character of the healer is typically a feminine, nurturing, bleeding-heart type. The second someone's magic revolves around healing, you can bet that they're going to need a strong man to stop them from giving too much of themselves in their healing. In the _Black Jewels Trilogy_ by Anne Bishop (worth reading for the sheer wtfery; the later books are better but less over the top), healers are a literal caste innately requiring protection from themselves, their own extreme impulse to give everything for others an enormous risk to their health and wellness.  It's such a common trope that the character archetype "the healer" in video games like World of Warcraft and League of Legends are more often than not female; if you don't believe me, here's the [relevant page on TV Tropes](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhiteMagicianGirl). But in reality, most doctors and nurses are not quite so self-sacrificing. Modern doctors and nurses do have punishing schedules, but this isn't inherent to the profession from a historical sense, and it doesn't explain the trope. Most of the medics and doctors I know in real life are adrenaline junkies or brilliant people driven to make a difference, not hyperfeminine carebots. From a historical perspective, I have no reason to believe that a "gift" for healing ever brought with it this sort of overabundance of a giving instinct, and from what I know of the early history of doctors, the darker impulses of that profession seem to have inspired a more Dr. Frankenstein approach. Many early folks in the medical field were first and foremost scientists. Since a big goal of mine with my writing is to have my fantasy stories be more informed by actual history than memetic impressions of history, ever since I wrote [Embaphium](https://eleanorkonik.com/embaphium/) %% ( [[2021-07-28 Embaphium (DRAFT)]] ) %% I've been collecting information about ancient doctors. In the Afterword for _Embaphium_ I talked about how ancient priests often served as healers, but I didn't discuss any particular ancient priestess-healers in particular. Turns out, though, we do know some things about individual Egyptian doctors; there's actually an apocryphal tale about an Athenian woman studying medicine in Alexandria and then returning home, disguised as a man, to practice medicine. Egypt had a bunch of high-ranking women priests; we have records indicating that a woman named Peseshet served as the "lady director of lady physicians." Whether she herself was a physician is open to debate. I think it seems likely, but bureaucracy is weird. Regardless, unlike poor apocryphal Agnodice we have pretty good evidence Peseshet existed, in the form of a stele found in a tomb that may have belonged to her son. According to the stele, one of her duties was to look after the pharaoh's mother's funerary priests. What I find most interesting isn't the fact of her gender, though, it's that Ancient Egypt had a tightly regulated medical field, with a strict hierarchy and education system. The Western tradition — especially the Classicists — sometimes acts like medicine was invented by the Greeks, but if anything that's just where we feel our particular culture calls back to; we have records of highly regimented medical training programs in other regions from over four thousand years ago. Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen are the most well-known Classical medical experts. Galen gets a bad rep because he's the guy who popularized the idea of the four humors, but from what I can tell, the snide treatment he gets from folks like Francis Bacon is undeserved. The son of a wealthy architect, his father apparently saw the god of healing in a dream, and the god said Galen should be a doctor. So of course Galen spent about a decade travelling around and studying medicine with various experts, then did what feels almost like a working apprenticeship stint treating injured gladiators. This was, it's important to note, very unusual; he wound up with what was almost certainly an exceptionally excellent understanding of human anatomy compared to his peers. This pissed off his peers, and he was run out of Rome. Later he was summoned back by the emperor to help deal with the plague, and became pretty famous; he had followers, Marcus Aurelius thought really highly of him, and he served as court physician for Commodus for many years. During his life, he wrote a _lot_ — books, letters, you name it. But mostly, it seems, he was driven by a very genuine desire to learn about medicine and share his knowledge, even at risk to himself. Kuria shares _that_ impulse, so in a way, she's not so far off from the self-sacrificing trope of the fantasy healer after all. ## Further Reading - For more about Galen, check out [this book review of](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-on-the-natural-faculties) _[On the Natural Faculties](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-on-the-natural-faculties)._ - If you were hoping this week's Afterword would be an explanation of what the heck a dakhma is, check out this article about how [the declining vulture population is making funerary practices in Mumbai difficult](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jan/26/death-city-lack-vultures-threatens-mumbai-towers-of-silence).