This is a lay
person’s edition of the PhD papers of Dr. Victoria Sweet’s research on
Hildegard von Bingen;[1] and a
lengthy report on the comings and goings at Laguna Honda Hospital in San
Francisco.
It’s a story
that could only take place in San Francisco: my old San Francisco. My
real affinity for San Francisco was the double-decade from about 1964-1983,
when I felt I was in touch with the soul of the City. For a big City, San Francisco is a small
town. I thought I knew everybody who was
anybody in those days: but what did I know?
I’d never heard
of Laguna Honda. It was right over the
hill when I ran “Fiddler’s Green Chess Salon” in Noe Valley: who knew? It was just down the way through the tunnel
when Iiving at the “end” of Market Street: who knew? My friend Lois used to tell me of her trip along this route picking
up/delivering bags of money for the local mafia; gave her nightmares of bloody
heads in the trunk.
Laguna Honda
appears to have been a lightning rod; a divisive issue for those in the medical
field over the past few decades in San Francisco. The author comes under mighty criticism on
the gossipy details of her career there.
But the value, and it is huge, of her writing this book is in her
personal development and recounting of a postmodern view of her philosophical
and medical education.
I
can not speak with any authority on the topic of homeopathic medicine; other
than I spent three years, post melanoma cancer op, under the “control” of a
homeopathic Clinic in Mill Valley led by Dr. Michael Gerber.
It
worked.
The passion
for pilgrimage is a bucket list envy of mine.
I first heard about the Spanish pilgrimage 30 years ago from my English step-daughter’s
birth dad, who was a political editor on the British Daily Telegraph. He did it and raved about the experience. My German wife went coast-to-coast across
Britain’s Hadrian’s Wall on a classic English pilgrimage, leaving me in further
awe.
[1] Saint Hildegard of Bingen, was a German writer,
composer, philosopher, elected a magistra by her fellow nuns in
1136, she founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165. One of her works
as a composer, the Ordo Virtutum, is an early example of
liturgical drama and the oldest surviving morality
play.
She wrote theological, botanical and medicinal texts, as well as
letters, liturgical songs, and poems, while
supervising miniature illuminations in the Rupertsberg manuscript of her first work, Scivias. The history of her recognition as a saint is
complicated, she has been recognized as a Doctor of the Church.
