Words.

A love story

Asclepius, the greek god of medicine.

A few days ago, I read a magnificent eulogy by

Ignacio M. Giribet

that was heartfelt, emotive but not corny, and really well written. It had a great structure and excellent penmanship. Here is what impressed my literary self the most: It seemed to have been whipped up as a last-minute thing after learning some terrible news, and I was in awe of the results. It’s in Spanish but you can read it here.

It made me wonder: what did my posts look like when served cold? A lot of thought goes into the content, but not the format, unfortunately. Ideas crowd the starting line and spill out onto the paper. No wonder, then, that my writings are more like scrambled eggs than cathedral-like architectural structures (which is what they look like to me when I hit the publish button).

Out of curiosity or a weird necessity of self-flagellation, I made the mistake of re-reading an essay I published this summer, of which I was (mistakenly) very proud, and I thought: My God, this is what I have subjected my readers to? I appreciate you all much more now. I cried to my husband: “C! I am crap at this! Why haven’t you told me before?” To which he replied: “I like what you write.” Typical response of a satisfied husband unable to be impartial. One cannot find a literary critic in one’s bed.

But this text is not about my shortcomings as a writer. I came to tell you about how I realised my love for words. Voices I listen to in admiration in love songs. Expressions I read in goodbye letters written by people I don't know but who know how to convey so well what they feel that I cry with them. Words I can't tame but need to write down.

Mine, like everything else in my life, has been an unconscious love with a late awakening - to be precise, the history of medicine class in my second year at university. The professor stank (figuratively), but still, I found the subject so captivating that I applied myself despite the obstacles. In this class, we had to make a dictionary, put all the words related to illness and the therapeutic art we found during the course, and look for their raison d’être, their etymological root. There is nothing like a lousy communicator-turned-teacher to kill off a sapling of interest, so when despite the teacher's well-intentioned failed attempts to teach us, I continued to enjoy the constant search for the origin of different medical terms that I came across along the way, I knew I was in love. So, I embarked on a journey of no return.

Without articulate language, we would be nothing more than monkeys with shoes and coats, or possibly without shoes and coats, without art, without books, without music, without science. Human beings have been characterised by a constant struggle to survive despite not being particularly fast, strong or resilient. And from that struggle, science was born. My love for science is really nothing more than my love for understanding what the world is like and how we explain it to others, the love for the words we use to tell us about the phenomena that happen around us. Without language, there are no ideas. Without understanding, there is no cure.

These days, with this weather, I could write a meta-analysis of chicken soup and its effects on colds, a subject so fascinating that it provoked a flurry of letters in the scientific journal CHEST back in 1975¹. It has even been speculated that chicken soup contains an “antibiotic” substance called bobamycin because chicken soup is known as “the penicillin of the Jews,” and bubbie is the Yiddish word for grandmother.

I could also speak of the word pylorus from the Latin pylorus, borrowed from the Greek pylorós- a word formed from pylé (door) and ouros (watchman). So our pylorus becomes the watchman of the door. A door that opens the intestine. After the brain, the gut speaks to us far more than any other organ in the body with its hundred million neurons. I wonder if this is why intuition is said to reside in the gut. Falling in love and fear, two very powerful emotions, are felt right there. Hence the saying “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” Well, every important place has to have a gatekeeper to guard the entrance, and the pylorus is just that.

But today, I intended to mention another word. I have been studying public health since October because I aspire to turn my profession around, for reasons I may tell you about another time. Our textbook covers global health, and since I first opened it on 8 October, malaria has been incessantly knocking on my door.

Malaria: contraction of the Latin malus and aria as it was believed, in those days of the Roman Republic, that the air coming in summer from the Pontine marshes outside Rome brought disease. Hence the word malaria was also interchanged with the word paludism, from the Latin noun palus, (swamp, marsh). This was not misguided since malaria is transmitted by a mosquito (Anopheles) that lays its eggs in swampy areas and transmits through its bite the parasite of the genus Plasmodium responsible for the disease.²

That's where I am, reading about malaria, bad air. That is a poetic word for a not-so-poetic disease, which still claims so many lives in low-income countries. In my textbook, I read other words, less beautiful, that also include unimaginable but real things, terms like “developing countries”, “preventable deaths”, “stunting due to malnutrition”, and “hunger.”

I read on, sometimes choking back tears, sometimes with a sorrow that feels like a heavy stone sitting right on top of my pylorus.

I leave you today with this jumble of ideas to try to explain to the world that words can be so beautiful and painful for what they help us express and for what they hide in their letters. I wanted to serve you a tiramisú, and in the end, as expected, I came out with scrambled eggs. Well, it's not so bad for breakfast on a Sunday morning.

Merry Christmas,

Ana

PS: From the text I mentioned at the beginning, which, when I reread, makes my nose itch in anticipation of tears, I'll keep these two sentences (translated with DeepL):

After fifteen minutes, I had already bought the tickets because with Montse I would have gone to look for the sources of the Nile.

...

Until then, I will continue to go for coffee at our table, guarding a small pile of books and missing you as I do today.

I hope someone thinks the same of me the day I die.

PS2: Before I close the chapter, I am going to take the risk of suggesting that, since you are going to buy some junk that your loved ones neither want nor need just because it’s Christmas, you could also consider the possibility of donating something to those who have wants and needs they cannot afford. Here are some links for you to do a little window-shopping of charity at ridiculous prices.

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1. You can read a summary here—a hilarious article (if you're into that sort of thing). https://journal.chestnet.org/article/S0012-3692(20)31863-8/fulltext

I recommend this website to find etymological roots. But I warn you that it is addictive. https://etimologias.dechile.net/

2.