{"id":87,"date":"2019-09-04T00:46:20","date_gmt":"2019-09-04T00:46:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chipbrown.com\/?page_id=87"},"modified":"2019-09-12T17:50:17","modified_gmt":"2019-09-12T17:50:17","slug":"books","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/chipbrown.com\/index.php\/books\/","title":{"rendered":"Books"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Good Morning Midnight: Life and Death in the Wild<\/a><\/em> <\/strong> Riverhead Books (2003)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Award-winning literary journalist Chip Brown tells the story of the life\n and death of a brilliant, complicated man-an outdoorsman with a \ntroubled soul, a pioneer of the New England wilderness, who sought \nrebirth in nature only to end his own life on a snowy mountaintop in a \ngesture of chilling premeditation. \n\nGuy Waterman checked out of his former life as a Capitol Hill \nspeechwriter and father of three at midlife to pursue the passion that \npromised to deliver him from his demons: mountain climbing. Along with \nhis second wife, he built a cabin nestled in the mountains of Vermont, \nwithout modern conveniences of any kind, in order to live purely on the \nland and for the land, and thereby to redefine himself in the extremes \nof frontier life. An accomplished jazz pianist who could recite hours of\n poetry, a genuine eccentric beloved by many, Waterman became the dean \nof the homesteading movement and the foremost historian of the mountains\n of the northeast. So when he methodically carried out his mountain \nsuicide, those who loved him were left to wonder whether it was the \naction of a noble man, painfully aware of the encroachments of age and \ndetermined to die with dignity, or that of a tragic figure doomed by the\n code of the Hard Man-a man who could not find the strength to be weak \nand forgive his own limitations. \n\nChip Brown writes with exhilarating clarity about the thrill of mountain\n climbing and with compassion and intelligence about the mystery that \nbegins when a life ends. Good Morning Midnight is a gripping story of \nsurvival in nature, with an existential heart. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

New York Times Book Review of Good Morning Midnight by Elizabeth Glibert <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

__________________________________________________________________________________<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Afterwards, You’re A Genius: Faith, Medicine and the Metaphysics of Healing<\/a><\/em> Riverhead Books (1998)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>
\n
\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

“This award-winning writer’s “remarkable” exploration of the mysterious art of healing is “beautiful and entertaining…unlike any book you’ve read on the subject of seeking.” – Esquire<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Immensely appealing…There are currents of deep warm humor, disarming wonder and original thought and scholarship, as well as colorful rambunctious language. – The Oregonian<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n“Deeply honest and dazzlingly intelligent.” – Pam Houston, Elle<\/em>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“A wonderful, thoughtful, charmingly written history of his examination of what we might generically call New Age healing practices… Language too is a subtle power, and Chip Brown has mastered it.” – Vince Passaro, Madison<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n“Compelling and believable.” – Abraham Verghese, Vogue<\/em>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“A brilliant study of human possibility-intellectually engaging, psychologically attuned, fearlessly imaginative, and full of surprises.” – Bob Woodward <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Exhilarating… Brown ponders the relationship of the body to the mind, the conflict between reason and faith, the role of spirituality in healing, the lack of humanity in the practice of modern medicine, and always the probability of the impossible. – Kirkus Reviews<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

EXCERPT: Afterwards You’re a Genius<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\n1. THE FLOWER OF THE DEAD<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n More than a few years ago, when I was in a bad way, wallowing in a\nsob story about an actress who’d exchanged me for a used-car\nsalesman in California, I went to see a psychic. It was half a lark, or so I\nthought at the time. The heartache that inspired the visit was real enough,\nbut I was not able to make any sense of it until much later, when I happened\non Borges’s description of love as a religion organized around a\nfallible god. For the millions of us who press on in a secular age, under\nDarwin’s empty heaven, love may be all we ever know of religion, and\nthe loss of love is that much more wrenching for its likeness to a crisis of\nfaith. What else but a confusion of divine and human realms can account\nfor the pain of misplaced devotion? Pain made worse by the ludicrousness\nof it all, the ersatz savior and the preposterous church and the disillusioned\nparishioner, who stumbles around in the aftermath\u2014stupefied,\nin my case, by the sight of his highly beloved on Channel 7 in a Fruit of\nthe Loom commercial. There she was! Dressed as a guava or possibly a\npassion fruit. Something tropical. I couldn’t see clearly. I was too busy\ngasping for air. She turned up again a few weeks later as a guest star on a\ncheesy detective show, but this time there was an offsetting, even therapeutic,\nconsolation: She got shot in the head.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n In those premillennial days, there were no psychic hotlines or $3.95-a-minute\nclairvoyants with has-been celebrities vouching for their skills,\nand the whiff of charlatanism that has always attended the guild of seers\nwas not half as ripe as it seems now. There were shrinks, of course, but I\nwanted to look ahead to the future, where I imagined redemption was\nwaiting, and not back, at the estrangement and misery of the recent past.\nA friend had given me the card of the Reverend Diane Nagorka at the\nNational Spiritual Science Center, which was described as “an oasis of\nspirit in the Nation’s Capital.” I made an appointment, and on a mild\nFebruary morning, I rode a bus up to the address in an old, middle-class\nneighborhood. At the end of a little path was a large house with a roomy\nporch. The receptionist who answered the door showed me into a living\nroom where the walls were hung with paintings of saints. The shades were\ndrawn, and in the Rembrandt gloom, the holy figures seemed almost\nluminous.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n At length, Reverend Diane emerged. The mistress of the oasis was in\nher early sixties and resembled a scuffed-up Katharine Hepburn\u2014a little\nunkempt but invincibly confident, and clearly not in the habit of suffering\nfools for more than three seconds. “I’ve been described as the\nno-nonsense psychic,” she said as she led me up the stairs to a candlelit,\nbook-lined consulting room where an effigy of the laughing Buddha\ngleamed in the corner. After many years, Reverend Diane had completed\nher doctorate in religious studies. She said she considered herself both a\n“psychic” and an “intuitive healer.” She believed that universal energies\nunknown to science pervaded the human body; they contained information\nthat could be read and used to promote health on any of the various\ntiers of a person’s being.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n With the laughing Buddha looking on, we settled into chairs across\nfrom each other. She fastened a small microphone to the collar of her\ndress and scribbled the date on a blank cassette, which she then popped\ninto a tape recorder. She closed her eyes. She took a deep breath. And\nthen she raised her hands as if she had just come back from a fly-fishing\ntrip and were regaling me with the tale of the big one that got away.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n “Mother-Father-God we thank thee, for thou hast said when two or\nthree are gathered together there thou will be also.” The invocation, spoken\nin her sandy voice, seemed to refine the air between us and impart a\nmood of ceremony and sacredness. You can work in Washington all your\nlife and never hear anyone use the word “hast.”\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n Reverend Diane’s predictions can’t really be of much interest all these\nyears later. She claimed only the ability to foresee the upcoming eighteen\nmonths. She talked nonstop, mostly with her eyes closed, speaking\nsmoothly and articulately as she presented the scenes and images appearing\nin her mind’s eye. I later came to appreciate that she did not resort to\nthe usual “cold reading” tactics of many so-called psychics; she did not\nfish for information, or pepper me with questions, or pursue themes on\nthe strength of cues and confirmations gleaned from my responses. She\nsaid she would offer the highlights I might expect in the coming months,\nperiods of excitement, transitions. And she stressed the provisional nature\nof her forecast, giving me the standard clairvoyant disclaimer that “all is\nchosen.”\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n I have to say that most of what she said seemed scarcely more interesting\nthan newspaper astrology, general enough not to be instantly\nrefutable, but hardly profound. Of course, I wonder now if I was ready to\nlisten to any of it, as I didn’t have the foggiest idea where or how she got\nher information, or how anyone could envision events that hadn’t happened\nyet. The very idea seemed crazy: an affront to the laws of the universe,\nat least as I presumed to understand them, which is to say an affront\nto the received wisdom of the culture I was trained in, a culture that had\nestablished science as the ultimate arbiter of reality. Science\u2014or the pop\ndistillate of it\u2014said that what can be objectively measured is intrinsically\nmore trustworthy, more valuable, more “real” than what can be subjectively\nfelt. Science had lionized matter at the expense of psyche and spirit,\nand imagined that its preference reflected the natural order of things, not\na metaphysical choice. Bones before dreams.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n I was jolted out of my reverie hearing Reverend Diane say I had a\nsort of ethereal aide de camp, a five-thousand-year-old Chinese man who\nacted as a spirit guide and who stayed mostly in the background but nevertheless\nentered my hand whenever I wrote or played the piano. How\nodd<\/em>: I hadn’t told her I wrote; I hadn’t mentioned having a piano.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n Altogether, she spoke for half an hour, and then abruptly broke off.\n“It’s like a movie on a screen, and when it’s over, that’s it,” she said,\nopening\nher eyes. She asked if I had any questions. Were there people I wanted\nto know about? Sure, I said. She was careful to advise that she would not\nbe invading their privacy, only reading what she could see of them in the\nfield of my being. I tossed out the names of siblings, my parents, some old\nfriends.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n Then I threw out the name of my mop-haired heartthrob, who had\ninspired so many fervent journal entries and whom I could still picture\nin the Off-Broadway play I first saw her in, singing a song called “Tiny\nLily.” After the performance, when I’d recovered from my rapture in the\nback row, we’d gone to dinner at a fish joint in the East Village, and as we\nwere leaving, I swiped a long-stemmed lily from a vase by the door and\npresented it to her. That night was the first night I stayed in her apartment.\nLilies were carved on the mantel of her fireplace. Lilies in the song,\nlilies by the door, lilies on the mantel. It had always seemed that our affair\nwas born under the sign of the lily, that we were wreathed in lilies, the\nflower of the dead.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n Reverend Diane screwed up her brow for a moment\u2014her eyes were\nclosed again\u2014and then shrugged, opened her eyes, and said offhandedly,\nas if she was sorry not to have more to tell, “Well, I see a lily.”\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n Well, I see a lily<\/em>.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n You could have knocked me over with a flower. No doubt she could\nhave said a hundred things that would have been equally true, equally\ndisorienting. A hundred things that would have disturbed me as much for\nlack of knowing how she came by them. She had a lot of material to work\nwith. My highly beloved had been ahead of her time. She had tried hard\nto balance the material cravings that attracted her to my American\nExpress card with nobler, more spiritual aspirations. She meditated. She\nfollowed a guru; she quoted p\u00e9nsees<\/em> about the “mystic traveler\nconsciousness.” She resolutely maintained her practice of magical thinking even\nthough she was disappointed when the five bucks she put in a coffee can\nnever metamorphosed into fifty or when\u2014the harder fate\u2014her hopes\nfor fame and success in acting never yielded more than a few bit parts and\nthe Fruit of the Loom spot.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n I can see now that she was one of those dream-drunk seekers in the\nvanguard of our disenchanted age for whom the great grail is simply to\nfeel good about themselves. She was dedicated to healing herself\u2014but\nof what, exactly, it was never clear. When the emollients of fame and\nmoney weren’t availing, she chased the chimera of perfect health as if it\nwere some sort of Utopia that could be attained by effort and technique.\nShe had her food allergies analyzed by an applied kinesiologist and steered\nclear of wheat. She launched juice fasts. She made appointments with a\n“white witch” to have her “aura brushed.” She was delivered of emotional\nblocks in sessions with a “rebirther” and had her colon periodically\nflushed with coffee enemas. (She kindly warned me never to use the\nearthy-looking towel on the back of the bathroom door.)\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n So had the reverend said, “I see a beleaguered AmEx card” or “I see\nsome coffee, not for drinking …” I would have been just as flabbergasted.\nThere was an immense volume of detail my clairvoyant apparently did\nnot perceive or find fit to report. But all the same, how had she divined\nthe significance of lily<\/em>? Why lily? Why not zinnia, gardenia, or furbish\nlousewort, which all meant nothing when lily meant the world? Many of\nthe scoundrels who staged s\u00e9ances in the nineteenth century used to keep\ncrib books of pertinent information on the prominent families who\nmight want their services. Reverend Diane might have surmised that I\nworked at the local newspaper, but there were only two people in North\nAmerica who could have grasped the import of lilies in the context of\nmy love life, and, actually, at that point, given how thoroughly and rapidly\nI had been eclipsed, I’m pretty sure there was only one. And that was me.\nAnd yet here was some old hast-speaking wisewoman pulling it out of\nthe ether.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n All these years later, I can still recall the peculiar urgency of that hour.\n“Our life is not so much threatened as our perception,” Emerson wrote.\nWhat was this country where science left off? Where the laws of ordinary\nexistence seemed to be suspended and sacramentalizing crones\ncould pinpoint the flower in a stranger’s heart? Again, this time in closing,\nReverend Diane raised her hands and gave thanks to her mother-father-god\nfor that wherever-two-or-three-were-gathered place. And by\nthen it seemed to me that we were up to our keisters in lilies, all of them\nglowing like that glass of poisoned milk in Hitchcock’s Notorious<\/em>.\nOminous life-altering lily-light filled the room. It seemed to me my\nframe of reference had been broken. My assumptions had been undermined.\nThere was a wound in my metaphysics.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n Over the years, I have had but to murmur to myself “I see a lily” to\nbring back the depths of amazement and affliction I felt that day.\nSometimes I would hear in the words a rebuke or a challenge to all the\npretty, categories of good sense and sound thinking that we flatter ourselves\nare true simply because we have established them; sometimes I\nwould hear a summons from across the border, the siren call of uncharted\nterritory. I began to read about psychics and their counterparts in healing\ncircles who attempted not just to see with clairvoyant sight but to\ninduce changes on the basis of their strange vision.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n And I began to wonder about that country. In an age when the gods\nhave become diseases, could one travel there with no qualification but\ncuriosity, or was more required\u2014the visa of illness, the passport of faith?\nWas it possible to report intelligibly about a place where facts were half\ndissolved in myth, and no two maps agreed, and the light, the weather,\nthe customs, and even the substance of the inhabitants were widely held\nto be indescribable by the seekers and screwballs who had been there\nalready? I wondered, because someday I meant to go.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n2. SHE STARTED TO DO BETTER<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n Shin, the snow leopard at the San Francisco Zoo, took a turn for the\nworse in early May of 1995. She was a month shy of her tenth birthday,\nand she’d lost a third of her weight. It was clear to the veterinarians,\nwho had her on antibiotics, that she was exhausted and dangerously ill.\nTheir tentative diagnosis: inflammatory bowel disease. By midmonth,\nShin stopped eating. She refused further medicine and would not come\ndown from her perch. The luster of her coat was fading. She had never\nseen the world she was produced for, having been born in the Bronx Zoo\nand having spent her whole life in captivity. But her native Asian habitat\nwas reflected in her beautiful coat: The gray of her fur was the hue of its\nmountain mists, the brown of her camouflage spots was the color of its\nragged earth. Shin’s secretive sisters were rarely seen in the wild, but their\nfootprints were sometimes spotted as high as twenty thousand feet in the\nsnows of Tibet.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n As it happened, the third week of May, eleven Tibetan monks arrived\nin San Francisco from their home-in-exile in Tenzin Gang, India. They\nhad been invited to perform their Gyuto Tantric chants by Mickey Hart,\nthe drummer of the Grateful Dead. They asked the keepers of the San\nFrancisco Zoo if there were any sick animals for whom they might offer\na puja<\/em>, a traditional prayer of purification, a prayer that Tibetans\nbelieve is not simply a petition for health but a way of actually strengthening the\nflow of life-energy in a sick creature. The sound itself rights the body.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n And so the monks, dressed in their saffron robes, were shown to the\nFeline Conservation Center, where Shin was draped listlessly on her\nperch. They formed two rows in front of her cage. None of them had\never laid eyes on a snow leopard; like Shin, most of them had never even\nbeen to Tibet. But when they raised their voices in the droning overtone\nchant of their monastic tradition, Shin stirred. She climbed down the logs\nfrom her perch fifteen feet above the ground and came to the edge of her\ncage. Her whiskers poked through the wire mesh. She blinked and\nrubbed her face with her paws. And as the monks sang, Shin sat raptly as\nif she recognized some music she had never heard from a country she had\nnever hunted. The puja<\/em> lasted only five minutes, but it seemed much\nlonger to the people in attendance\u2014the keepers from the feline center,\nzoo staff, an Associated Press religion reporter. It seemed timeless and\nexquisitely beautiful. It was as if a bond had formed between the monks\nand the leopard, and with each minute that Shin remained at the edge of\nthe cage, listening, some old kinship bound the wounds of exile in man\nand animal both.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n When the chanting stopped, Shin turned and walked away. Later that\nday, her appetite came back, and for the first time in two weeks she\nshowed some enthusiasm for her diet of horse meat and fortified meal.\n“She seemed so peaceful,” said Nancy Chan, the zoo’s publicist. “She\nstarted to do better.”\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n Alas, healing and curing are not the same. On the ninth of June, her\ntenth birthday, the snow leopard died.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n3. FRIGHTS AND MARVELS<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nHealing, from the Old English word haelen<\/em>: to make whole. Whole,\nas in stitch the gash, reduce the fracture, bind the wound, assuage\nthe burn, slake the fever, ice the chill, purge the poison, drain the pus, pull\nthe bullet, excise the tumor, check the bug, dissolve the clot, uncloud the\neye, allay the pain, reflate the lung, restart the heart, replace the liver, repair\nthe mind, revive the spirit, retrieve the soul, redeem the life. Long before\nhealing was a science, it was an art, a piece of faith, a form of magic. The\ncatalogue of frights and marvels compiled in its name is almost beyond\nimagining.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n In Ireland in the seventeenth century, it was said whooping cough\ncould be cured by drinking water from the skull of a bishop. For\ntuberculosis (which ravaged Mozart, Goethe, Emerson, Kafka, Dostoevsky,\nChekhov, Keats, and Shelley) people hung cans of dog fat over their\nshoulders; they swallowed monkey gallstones and slime from snails; they\nlingered in barns, inhaling draughts of dung-tanged air. In many parts of\nEurope, the odor of semen freshly ejaculated into a handkerchief was\nthought to cure anemia in young girls, and to improve their looks too.\nFlu patients sucked holy pebbles and drank urine and sprinkled the dirt\nof graveyards on their doorways. In the late nineteenth century, one of\nthe members of the Brahmin Crowninshield family carried a horse chestnut\nin his pocket for relief from rheumatism (and at the time he was overseeing\ncurriculum reform at Harvard’s medical school).\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n Two years before he died in the eruption of Vesuvius, in 79 A.D.,\nPliny the Elder noted a Persian cure for headache: tightly bind your\ntemples with a rope procured from the estate of someone who recently used\nit to commit suicide. For skin ulcers, apply goat dung kneaded with\nvinegar; for a chafed foot, ointment made from the ashes of an old shoe. For\nsnakebite, apply one half of a severed mouse. (Which half? Apparently it\ndidn’t matter.) Much later, an especially elaborate cure for syphilis was\ntendered to Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI: He was to find\n“someone of worthless estate” to suck out his sores, then have his lesions\npoulticed with live frogs chopped in half, and then get some rest inside\nthe carcass of a freshly disemboweled mule. And on and on it went.\nPowdered Egyptian mummy was a popular ingredient in Renaissance\nprescriptions. People drank a pur\u00e9e of old shoe soles for dysentery. They\nfound a cure-all in moss scraped from the skulls of executed criminals.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n Lest you think the twentieth century can’t compete, there has been no\nshortage of mail-order panaceas available C.O.D. In 1928, after your morning\ncoffee enema, you could hook up the “Vitalizer,” which consisted of\ntwo “Vitality” batteries, a long wire cord, and a six-inch bar of metal,\nwhich was to be carefully inserted in the rectum, where it could then\ndistribute one and a half volts of life-affirming electricity and quickly cure\ndiabetes, cancer, and TB. The perfect gift for the new graduate contemplating\na career in the secret police. A few decades later, people bought “Z\nray” generators at fifty dollars each, which were supposedly able to expand\nthe space between their body’s atoms and thus relieve the pain of arthritis.\nIn the 1950s, patients paid money to sit in old mine tunnels for some uncertain\nbenefit. Seawater was advertised all over the U.S. in the 1960s for the\ntreatment of pimples, gray hair, baldness, diabetes, and cancer. Those were\nthe good old days of robust government intervention. Federal marshals\nfanned out across six states, seized two thousand bottles of Florida-packed\nseawater, and broke up a scam the Food and Drug Commissioner\ndenounced as a “nationwide seawater swindle.”\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n If the desperation weren’t so pitiable, you could almost admire the\ninventiveness of the minds that saw healing remedies in chopped frogs\nand old-shoe ashes. “The history of medicine,” the medical novelist\nRichard Gordon once wrote, “is largely the substitution of ignorance by\nfallacies.” If Americans want to choke down unpasteurized seawater and\npossibly jeopardize their kidneys, why should they be restrained by their\npublic officials? The real danger has always been the remedies that are\nworse than worthless, that wreak havoc in the name of healing. The\nAmerican doctor Benjamin Rush, who had enormous influence on\nRevolutionary War-era medicine in America, thought the human body\ncontained twice as much blood as it actually does and advocated\ndraining four-fifths of that exaggerated quantity from sick patients. Given\nthe treatment the English king Charles II got after toppling over\nbackwards while being shaved one morning in February 1685\u2014the victim\nof what may have been a stroke or a heart attack\u2014he might have preferred\na weekend in a gutted mule. As the king went into convulsions\u2014\nhis mouth foaming, his eyes rolling back\u2014fourteen doctors rushed to his\naid. They were all disciples of the medical approach that came to be\nknown with thanks-but-no-thanks irony as “heroic medicine.” One, a\nDr. Scarburgh, kept a record of their unmerciful assistance. (The often-\ncited account I’m indebted to was first published in 1929 in a book called\nDevils, Drugs and Doctors<\/em> by the physician and Yale physiology professor\nW. Haggard.)\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n First a pint of blood was taken from His Majesty’s right arm. Then his\nshoulder was cut open and another eight ounces of blood were “cupped”\nout. He was given an emetic to make him vomit, two purgatives, an\nenema, another purgative, and two hours later, still another purgative. His\nhead was shaved; his scalp was blistered. He was dosed with powdered\nhellebore root to make him sneeze and powdered cowslip flowers to fortify\nhis brain. To soothe his system after the cathartics, he was given barley\nwater flavored with licorice, and almonds; cups of absinthe and white wine\nalso were provided. His feet were plastered with a mix of Burgundy pitch\nand pigeon dung. Again he was bled, and purged with a variety of\nmedicaments prepared from flowers, spices, various barks, even dissolved pearls.\n“Later came gentian root, nutmeg, quinine, and cloves.” The king rallied\nthe next morning, and bells were rung across London, but he again went\ninto convulsions. Forty drops of extract of human skull were administered.\nThen, a “rallying dose of Raleigh’s antidote” was forced down his throat.\nIt contained “an enormous number of herbs and animal extracts.” The king\nwas given bezoar stone\u2014probably not the bezoar stone which legend held\nto be the crystallized tears of a deer that had been bitten by a snake, but\ngallstones harvested from a goat’s stomach. “Alas,” Dr. Scarburgh noted.\n“After [another] ill-fated night his serene majesty’s strength seemed\nexhausted to such a degree that the whole assembly of physicians lost all\nhope and became despondent; still, so as not to appear to fail in doing their\nduty in any detail, they brought into play the most active cordial.” And,\nHaggard concludes, “As a sort of grand summary to this pharmaceutical\ndebauch, a mixture of Raleigh’s antidote, pearl julep, and ammonia was\nforced down the throat of the dying king.”\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n A woodcut from the time depicts Charles on the throne\u2014in better\ndays\u2014laying his hands on the head of a tubercular subject. Priests and\ncourtesans look on; the king smiles serenely. It’s more than a little ironic that\nCharles was a practitioner of this much gentler form of healing, which was\nknown as the “royal touch.” Certainly it might have served him better than\nhis doctors, but then, as king, he had a monopoly on the practice and, short\nof abdicating and quickly crowning his successor, he would have been in\nthe strange position of having to treat himself. In between fishing and\nhunting and playing tennis and riding horses out in the morning to watch\nhawks, and roughhousing with his King Charles spaniels and his pet monkey,\nand reigning over “one of the most tumultuous periods of English history,”\nnot to mention attending to some thirty-nine mistresses\u2014he left\nbehind at least fourteen illegitimate children and was of the opinion that\n“God will never damn a man for allowing himself a little pleasure”\u2014\nCharles II was an especially busy healer. Between 1667 and 1684, more\nthan 68,000 people put themselves in His Majesty’s hands. The crowds\nwere so large in 1684 that half a dozen people were trampled to death. The\npresenting complaint was mainly scrofula, or facial tuberculosis. (People\nwith epilepsy went to see executioners, who strangely enough supplemented\ntheir income with a little hands-on healing.) “As far as the records\ngo, [Charles] appeared to believe in his own powers;” writes the English\nosteopath Harry Clements in his 1952 book Magic, Myth and Medicine<\/em>.\nClements noted that the effort may well have been in vain as “mortality\nrates of the period showed no real diminution.” And when William III\ncame to the throne, he made no secret of his dubious view of the royal\ntouch, saying to patients, “God give you better health and more sense.”\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   \n Whatever the efficacy of royal touch\u2014Sir Richard Blackmore, writing in\n1726, said the credit for its success belonged to the “wonderful Power\nof Imagination”\u2014a dose of hands-on healing would not have mauled the\nprinciple of First Do No Harm as badly as the official physicians did.\nAlas, as Scarburgh said; alas. There may be reasons to prefer life\nin the seventeenth century, but royal doctoring isn’t one of them. Before\nhe died, in what may reign forever as the sovereign example of English\ncivility, Charles II apologized to his medical team.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(C) 1998 Chip Brown All rights reserved. ISBN: 1-57322-113-9\n\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Award-winning literary journalist Chip Brown tells the story of the life and death of a brilliant, complicated man-an outdoorsman with a troubled soul, a pioneer of the New England wilderness, who sought rebirth in nature only to end his own life on a snowy mountaintop in a gesture of chilling premeditation. Guy Waterman checked out… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":70,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-87","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chipbrown.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/87","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chipbrown.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chipbrown.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chipbrown.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chipbrown.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chipbrown.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/87\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chipbrown.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}