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By Root 596 0

itself on two or three other patients in the past. He believed in the medicinal properties of opposites: cold to cure heat, sweetness to cure bile, and so on. He used herbs, and sacrifices were of course conventional, though he opposed ostentation of any sort and once refused to treat a feverish man whose family had ruined itself to buy and slaughter an ox on his behalf. The hysterical waste of it revolted my father, and (probably more to the point) made him doubt they would follow any less glamorous, more pragmatic instructions of his. The man died. My father disliked, too, the procedure known as incubation, where a patient would be made to spend a night alone in a temple in the expectation that the god would send him a dream of how he was to be cured. My father said this was blasphemous. He taught me to keep case studies, charting the progress of an illness day by day in the modern manner, though he seemed to prefer problems that needed only a single visit. “In and out,” he would say with satisfaction after some spectacular single treatment; I once saw him pop a separated shoulder back into place in the time it took to greet the man. He had a gift for childbirth, though he particularly despised women healers, and tolerated midwives only grudgingly. They practised witchery for the most part, he told me, and were irrational, untrustworthy, and liable to do more damage to a woman than if she were left alone and allowed to follow her own crude animal instincts. He spoke of women in these terms generally—witches, animals. Still, he was at his softest with a labouring woman, speaking gently, cajoling but not babying, and greeting each dripping purple arrival with quiet joy, lifting it to the light in a private ritual only I recognized as such, having seen it again and again.

The first surgery I ever witnessed he performed on a local village girl who had been labouring for two days. She was only half-conscious by the time we got to her, though we lived only a few minutes’ walk away, and the family had already begun to prepare the house for her death: neighbour women had gathered by the front door, hoping to be hired for the mourning, and we stepped past a tray of anointing oils and white cloths outside the sickroom door, as well as a coin for the ferryman to be put in her mouth once she was dead. My father examined her quickly, palpated her belly, and said the baby had started to come feet first and was stuck. Quickly he stripped the bed and the girl and called for clean sheets. I stared at the great mound of her belly, trying to picture the arrangement inside. I was ten, and had never seen a woman naked before. “Can you see it?” my father said, unexpectedly.

I thought he had forgotten me. I knew he meant could I imagine the position of the baby through the flesh, and I said I wasn’t sure. The wet sheets were replaced with new.

“This is so I can see the progress of the fluids, the colour and quantity and so on,” my father said, just to me, calmly, as though all this—the dying girl, the weeping family, the husband already wordless, motionless in a corner chair, grief-stricken—was for my private instruction. “Did you bring my knives?”

A rhetorical question. It was my job to prepare his kit every morning before we set out and to clean it every evening when we got home, and though we generally had some idea of the patients we would be visiting in the course of a given day—say, a childbirth, a fracture, a couple of fevers in the same house, a baby with spots, an old one bringing up blood—my father told me never to bring only what I thought we would need, because inevitably we would be surprised by something and find ourselves lacking. The resulting kit of everything strapped to my back was too heavy for me to walk upright, but I knew better than to complain. Wraps and bandages, woollen pads, splints, sponges, plaster, bowls and ampoules for collecting fluids and other excretions, metal wands for cautery, a tablet and stylus for note-taking, a selection of herbs and medications for the most common remedies (he kept a larger apothecary