The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [123]
Other bits and pieces of medical lore, conditions, diseases, and cures, were given to me by acquaintances (for instance, the picturesque loa-loa worm that Claire encounters in Voyager was suggested to me via E-mail by a reader who had noticed that I was writing scenes set in the West Indies), or picked out of the ragbag of memory. The vivid description of death caused by a strangulated hernia was taken (not verbatim, just the notion of it) from a brief excerpt from the writings of Albert Schweitzer, which I encountered in a course in German reading that I took in graduate school (lo these many years ago). I had to translate the passage in which Dr. Schweitzer described the pitiful death of one such patient, and it stuck in my mind. Things do, I’m afraid.
1Though I did once read a book with a time-traveling heroine who listened to motivational business tapes in her own time, and then ended up with a successful business designing silk lingerie for eleventh-century Viking raiders. Neither Claire nor I have that much imagination, I’m afraid.
2This very equitable division of labor has undergone drastic readjustments with the advent of reliable birth control, but since birth control was not very dependable in the eighteenth century, we really needn’t worry about a discussion of gender roles here. In the eighteenth century, women still took care of children and men killed things, the end.
3I do have a Ph.D. in ecology, and when I taught, my students did usually call me “Doctor”—partially out of respect, no doubt, but mostly because they couldn’t pronounce my last name and were too shy to use my first one. My father-in-law called me “Dr. poo” for a while after I got my degree, but eventually stopped.
4I know that not all nurses these days dress in white, nor are they women. I’m speaking generally here of nurses in the twentieth century, for the sake of the point.
5It is quite possibly not coincidental that Ishmael (Voyager) asks Claire whether she “still bleeds,” explaining that only old women can work real magic—nor is it coincidental that the Tuscaroran seer, Nayawenne, told Claire that she would achieve her full power “when your hair is white (Drums).
On the other hand, it was purely coincidental that Geillis Duncan’s hair should have been a blonde so pale as to be “almost white, the color of heavy cream.” Or at least I think it was.
6We discover new refinements and explanations of the Gabaldon Theory as the novels continue. Stay tuned for further developments!
7Alexander Fleming—a Scot, by coincidence—discovered penicillin in 1929. However, folk remedies involving molds (mostly of bread) are known from as far back as 3000 B.C. (There are in fact hundreds of species of Penicillium, which grow on substrates from bread to cheeses to rotting melon.)
8Coincidentally, the course also exposed me to numbers of nursing students, giving me an appreciation for the mixture of matter-of-factness and dedication so common among them. I still recall one male nursing student I’ll call Wally, from my days at Philadelphia Community College.
My students at PCC were a good deal older than those at the university; most had chosen nursing as a career after several years spent earning a living in other occupations. Watty had been a truck driver, between stints spent in jail for gang and drug-related activities, and was now, at the age of thirty-five, determined to turn his life around and become a nurse. He was one of the best and most attentive students, always asking questions, taking extensive notes, and admonishing the rowdier students to “Shut up and listen to the Doctah!”
All the students were required to take both my class in human anatomy and physiology, and another in “hands-on” clinical nursing, which covered common bedside procedures, among other things. One morning, Wally marched into my class, hair standing on end, his glasses glittering with fury. What happened? I asked, afraid that there might have been some trouble with the law or his former