The Return of the Girl

To school, that is. I have before me (God willin' and the dam don't bust) a whole day in which to write and research. And drag the dog, but that's only an hour.

Bliss.

Meanwhile, The Bookseller has noticed Book View Cafe and ROCKET BOY. I have the happy, slightly unnerved feeling that I may be in on the ground floor of something big. Hot dawg.

Election Day Came Creeping on Little Cat Feet

After the hoopla of last year, this year we have two uncontested races in San Francisco, nothing on the state and national level, and a handful (five?) of propositions that seem profoundly unworrisome. Voting took 30 seconds. The poll workers seemed profoundly bored (but cheery).

Ahh, well. Another franchise exercised.

Knowing Too Much and Too Little: Ancient Medical Division

One of the panels I went to (briefly) at WFC was on writing in historical settings, and at one point one of the panelists said something on the lines of "And for god's sake, if you're writing about medicine, don't insist on using modern herbals." We know that white willow bark works as an anodyne because it's got the same active ingredient as aspirin, and yes, willow bark was used in the Olden Days (both Trotula and Hildegarde of Bingen mention willow bark, but not as a cure all for pain, and it's often in combination with so many things that you get the sense they just threw in whatever came to hand and hoped that something helped), but it's kind of a cheat to use only the things we know now were helpful. If you try to have someone put a poultice of moldy bread on a septic wound, imagining that you suggest "Oh, look, my hero is so forward looking that he has created penicillin!" I will hunt you down and slap you. I've been reading a good deal of fiction set then or with medical practitioners as significant characters, and I cannot tell you how irritating I find the sort of "my doctor's an atheist and way ahead of her time" shtick.

I've decided, for my own work, that my character is allowed one "cheat," as it were--something that I know would have given her a slight edge. With her, it's cleanliness: she's trained by a healer who has a belief system that requires washing hands between each chore, and not bringing the dirt or ick from one task to the next. For the rest, I'm trying to use the cures and suggestions from Dame Trot and St. Hildegarde, and not to cherry-pick the ones that seem most likely to succeed. It's harder this way, but ultimately more fulfillilng and more fun. I want Laura and her teacher to be medical practitioners of their time--multiple-chambered-wombs and charms and astrology and all. Besides, they did know stuff that surprises the modern reader--a well-trained healer could diagnose diabetes from urine. The fact that she could also diagnose possession and a disruption of humors just makes it more then.