The Time-Traveling Healer
Flash-fiction - by Rachel Rodman
I came—I enrolled—because suffering moves my heart. Wherever it is. Whenever.
Doctors without Temporal Borders.
In its service, I go to places in the deep past—places that lack the advantages, both conceptual and technological, that my education confers.
The portals through which we pass are in the Pacific, on a series of islands which barely emerge from the water, and which were one of the last to be marked by any cartographer.
This archipelago is, as they say—or would have said, in another time (my traveling, I confess, sometimes affects my speech, and I find myself using quaint phrases)—at the “edge of the World.”
It is certainly at the edge of Time.
How do these portals work?
And why is it that, on these tiny islands, and within the networks of caves that twist beneath them, we can only set out in one direction—the past—before journeying back to the point of our departure? That there exists an entire category of destinations—the what will be—that we have never been able to reach?
It is curious.
But I am a healer (another quaint phrase!), through and through. I am a doctor, heart and soul. That is my identity and my only official qualification. And, though I do engage in occasional armchair speculation (though armchairs, in the Whens I am posted, are rarely provided to me), I will, in the end, leave these great Whys to other minds.
I am not a philosopher.
Anyway—and after all—it is the past that needs us.
All those yesterdays.
My previous postings brought me to the Hundred Years War and to the Crusades. Here, I honed my bedside manner. I also discovered that the past is like nothing so much as a foreign country. Wherever one’s When—whenever one’s Where-—culturally-specific arguments must be applied to overcome your patients’ resistance to your unfamiliar methods. You must persuade them to allow you to heal them.
In spite of themselves.
My latest posting, however, is not merely in the deep past, but in the deep, deep past—3,000 years back, before historical and intellectual benchmarks that make the mind reel a little.
Before almost everything that we would regard as modern.
Before even Latin—the language of physiology and medicine; the source of all those anatomical words, in endless lists: Brachialis, Ulna, Clavicula, and so on, that every medical student must memorize.
Before even Hippocrates, that Doctor of Antiquity, whose oath (and how fitting!) our time-traveling cadre has in part adopted.
Not born yet.
“You can do this,” said Dr. Harvey, one of the administrators of our organization, when he appeared to me at my last When (disguised as an injured soldier from the House of Valois) in order to describe my next one.
“I can do this,” I said. Because...couldn’t I?
Can’t I?
I have knowledge. And I have heart.
As for the rest…
“Stop!” I say now (the local now).
A band of four is crouching above a sick man. I think that they have good intentions (Aren’t intentions so often good?)
But their tools!
I do a quick inventory. I see fire, a container of water, and a basket of withered leaves.
I do not recognize the leaves. And water (I suppose) can do no harm?
But I shudder to think what they hope to accomplish with the fire.
As if fire were some “god,” whose beneficence might assist them.
Don’t get me started.
None of the languages that I presently know—not even Latin!—will of course be of any use to me. (“That will be part of the challenge!” said Dr. Harvey, part in warning and part in encouragement.) So I follow my—to them—meaningless sound, “Stop!” with a series of emphatic gestures.
Halt!
No!
And they do stop; they stare back at me. Whether because of my volume or because of my gestures. Or—more likely!—in deference to the “miracles” that I shared with them yesterday: demonstrations of the cunning items I carry in my pockets, objects that can bend light and generate sound.
They already have a sense of what I can do.
As I step slowly closer, I begin to mime what is wrong with this man—a thing which, even from a distance, even from the beginning, had been all too tragically obvious.
“Too much!” I say with an accompanying gesture. Expansion, superfluity. “Too swollen!” I say.
Not that they understand this either. But this time the problem is more profound than language.
To them, the body is not what it is to me. To them, it is—yes—an assemblage of liquids. But these liquids are not ordered according to any coherent philosophy. To them, the body is a place where “gods” war.
Don’t get me started.
To save this man—and I have known this from the beginning!—I will have to take over.
“Stand aside,” I tell them, keeping my voice kind, my gestures authoritative.
They do not move.
In what follows, I know well, diplomacy will be as important as medicine.
Slowly, I withdraw an object again from my pockets. It is one of the same ones I used during my first demonstration at my arrival on the local yesterday. It is the one, in my judgment, that most impressed the larger group of which they were assuredly a part.
It is—quaintly enough!—the simplest of my objects. It has no intricate knobs or complex inner workings.
With it—just as before—I cause the glitter of the fire to glitter back at them.
They are riveted.
Then, through careful gestures, I communicate to them: I will give them this item, this mediator of the light trick, but they must step back.
I will give it to them...but they must step back
Way back.
“Farther,” I say emphatically, even after the main negotiations have concluded, and I have given them their reward.
As they move away, I wistfully reflect that it would be nice to have an assistant. In a few months, perhaps, when my status among these people has grown and I am better able to communicate with them, I will begin to train one. I already have an eye on one of the boys.
But it is too early for that now.
This patient’s case is too dire. My course of action is too clear.
I cannot risk anyone interfering or objecting.
And my tools? Ha!
At this critical stage of my early relationship with them (light tricks aside!), they would find these too disturbing.
When the band of four are far enough away, performing with the light trick at another fire—a distant-enough fire—I block their view of what I am doing with my back.
My patient, lost in his own suffering, gives me a glassy look. When I make my first incision, he manages only a soft moan.
“Faster,” I whisper. “Faster.”
My bowl fills.
When I have taken what I judge to be enough blood, I bandage the salutary cuts I have made. I use tested and true bandages, which have served patients in several other time periods.
Good, experienced bandages.
I do not know if this man will live.
I have rarely seen a patient whose humors were so severely out of alignment.
I have never seen a body that contained such an unhealthy excess of blood.
But I am giving him a chance.
It is the sort of chance that he never would have had if I had not come.
I shudder a little. And it is this shivery feeling, this inimitable mixture of gratitude and sadness, which no other experience has ever been able even remotely to evoke, that has long kept me in this service.
What would have happened to this man if I had not come?
When I have settled him in a comfortable sleeping position—when my bloodletting instruments are clean—I return him to the supervision of his people.
Tomorrow, I indicate to them, as best I can.
I will come again tomorrow.
At sunset, I retreat to my own tent. I stare into my own fire. Then, as on many nights in other Whens, I whisper the name of my homeland. It is not a message; this invocation serves exclusively an emotional purpose. For as intensely as I serve, I am still often desperately sick for home. It is a land that I must mark in numbers and not by place, in years since the birth of Our Savior (who, in this When, is not yet born). Anno Domini, and blessed be His name—
1642.