Primum non nocere, reads a key line of the Hippocratic Oath: “First do no harm.” For millennia, healthcare workers have tried to remember this ethical principle, yet human nature still often takes over. As is too common with religious differences, it’s far easier to squabble than to collaborate.
In our modern world, science supersedes belief, no? And enlightened, western religion supersedes mystical religions of the land, right? In the past 40-or-so years, many have come to question such an inevitable march to secularism, and the academic establishment has come to appreciate the value of old traditions. Further, healthcare workers have come to recognize that healing, though able to be studied by science, has many characteristics of an art-form. Studies show that placebos work better than no treatment, so belief plays a certain role. Indeed, often the best healers – of any profession – are those who are themselves healed.
These abstract ideas plague our best minds at university philosophy departments, divinity schools, and medical centers. Yet in this book, Teri Brown brings them down to earth in a multi-generational story in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, mostly in the 1890s. By varying between three points of view for three generations of women-healers (as is customary in her tales), she teaches how healing can also occur within families – indeed, often is necessary within families.
The grandmother Maggie, though white, learned her herbal healing arts from the Cherokee, a refined indigenous people in the region. She combined their spirituality with her own Christian tradition and tended to people in her mountain town. Her daughter Carrie Ann witnessed her mother’s shortcomings and chose instead to voyage to Boston to learn the “enlightened” science of nursing. However, to study, she left her daughter Josie Mae to be raised by Maggie, and Josie feels caught between these two matriarchs, each representing a distinct healing tradition. Such a feeling of confusion increases when Carrie Ann returns to staff a local clinic near her original home.
As happens in life, drama and challenges ensue, all centered around healing others and the healing necessary in this family. Brown captures readers’ interest in how competing ideologies might coexist in an intimate family. Though set primarily in the 1890s, these problems are very modern. Newspapers chronicle daily how America’s pluralist society struggles with competing viewpoints. Like the McCourys, we must learn to work together, lest our animosities turn into destruction. Especially those in healing professions, like myself in biomedical research, can learn how to avoid ideological traps. These traps, though well intentioned, can stymie progress and healing. Healing and being healed are some of the most human of all activities, and Brown encourages us to dive deeply into their rivers.
Daughters of Green Mountain Gap: A Novel
By Teri M. Brown
Copyright (c) 2024
Atmosphere Press
ISBN13 9798891320567
Page Count: 325
Genre: Fiction
Sponsored link to www.amazon.com