On modern medicine

I spend a lot of time reading (and writing!) scholarly investigations of medieval medicine, pointing out the effectiveness of remedies tested by practice, and reminding non-specialists that it wasn't until the later nineteenth century that practices based on research into germ transmission started to be systematically implemented. The number of Completely Untrue Things written about medieval understandings of health, hygiene, and medicine are truly distressing. (For the record: many medieval cities had public bathhouses; water was not universally unsafe to drink; management of clean air and water was pursued at an individual and collective level.) But I digress. This specialist soapbox-standing is but a preamble to the observation that German druggists' and pharmacies still bear witness to much older and more diverse practices of maintaining and repairing health than U.S. drugstores. Shelves of herbal teas specially designed for a variety of minor ailments are here normative, not reserved (and priced) for niche health food stores. I've had more colds this winter than in any season I can remember, so have proved the effectiveness of "Bronchial health" tea, which advertised that its composition was based solely on experience and tradition, and lemon-herb cough suppressant tablets created in a monastery garden. And these are not just shelf remedies: the pharmacist at the Apotheke recently gave me ibuprofen for a fever, and for the sore throat that accompanied it, an oil of cloves, sage, fennel, and eucalyptus. With years of experience of self-selecting giant bottles of aspirin and syrupy compounds as potent as they are evil-tasting, I've found that these new customs take some getting used to. But I really do like them, on principle. The doctor to whom I turned in my need for antibiotics handed over her prescription with the advice "And drink lots of tea!" With both prescriptions, as you may imagine, I have enthusiastically complied. My planned spurt of pre-Christmas productivity was laid low, but fortunately, there are a number of old Heinz Rühmann movies on YouTube. And I have truly massive quantities of tea.