The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [119]
In fact, healing is an art, and has always been understood as such—at least until the very recent past, when the advent of sophisticated technology has given us the delusion that the miracles of the body are all both explicable and controllable. Many are—but not all. Not yet, anyway!
Consequently, there are echoes throughout all the Outlander books—superstition and magic resonating through the practice of rational medicine—that exemplify the unique attitudes of the second half of the eighteenth century. The Age of Enlightenment was a period of transformation, in terms of culture, society, and thought— magic, if you will, brought about by the power of reason.
Claire, with her peculiar perspectives, personifies the practice of medicine, mingling the rational and the metaphysical, the traditional and the modern, in pursuit of the ancient goals of the healing arts: the preservation and restoration of health. Modern as she is, she is herself an echo of the Age of Enlightenment, with its odd mixtures of alchemy and chemistry, its hold on tradition, and its search for innovation. She is, in fact, the Return of the Leech.
WHITE LADIES
If one is looking for entertaining accidents of history, it’s worth noting that nurses in modern days have most often been “women in white.” Whether chosen for its evident “purity” (and hence the implication of antisepsis), or because blood shows up on it really well, the white uniform worn by many modern nurses evokes the image of earlier “white ladies.”4
The White Lady is a figure of Celtic myth, known (in varying manifestations) in all Celtic countries, including not only Ireland and Scotland, but Brittany as well (hence the knowledge of “La Dame Blanche” among the rapists Claire meets in the Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré). Generally speaking, the White Lady is the dryad of death; she is often identified with Macha, Queen of the Dead, and sometimes as the Crone aspect of the Goddess (the Goddess is said to have three forms: Maiden, Mother, Crone—which signify the chief phases of female life).
Looking more particularly, though, legends of “white ladies” don’t always portray these as figures of death and destruction— though this depiction is common—but in some places as figures of healing and sorcery. Macha, one of the mythic figures identified as the White Lady, is also the Mother of Life and Death—she (and all lesser white ladies, presumably) presides over both birth and death—which, it struck me, was pretty much what a doctor does.
Given Claire’s naturally pale complexion, her healing arts (and the ruthlessness which is a natural part of them), and her supernatural connections (both real and perceived), it seemed only reasonable to endow her—via Jamie’s fertile imagination and familiarity with Celtic myth—with the title of “La Dame Blanche.”5
WHY WORLD WAR II?
The decision to make Claire a healer dictated the time period from which she came. There were two reasons for choosing the period right after World War II: one, antibiotics, and two, technology.
World War II marked the emergence of truly “modern” medicine, with the advent of antibiotics—sulfa drugs were put into common usage on the battlefields and in the medical hospitals of World War II, and while penicillin was discovered in 1929, no use was made of it until 1941, when the incidence of wartime injuries and infections made its development both economically feasible and socially imperative.
Prior to this time—and in fact, during a good part of the early days of the war— medical procedures were still very old-fashioned. While techniques such as bleeding and purging had been abandoned, many older techniques—wound-dressing and surgical practices—were still in common use. Therefore, a nurse who had worked under combat conditions in World War II would not find the conditions of the eighteenth-century Highlands to be nearly as strange or unusual as would a more modern medical practitioner.