medicine

February 24 – take your medicine!

/ Kokuu / 1 Comment

Yunmen, teaching his community, said, “Medicine and disease cure each other. The whole earth is medicine. Where do you find yourself?”

— The Blue Cliff Record (Hekiganroku), case 87

“’He’s taken my medicine, he’s taken my medicine, he’s taken my medicine!’ sang Roo happily, thinking it was a tremendous joke.”

— A A Milne, The House at Pooh Corner


When we get sick, at the most basic level we want to go to someone and be given something that will make us well.  This, essentially, is medicine. 

With many chronic illnesses we quickly learn that this kind of medicine does not exist and returning to health is not a simple matter of taking a tablet or popping a pill.  Rather it is more like a complete reappraisal of your life, finding the things that make you feel better, and pruning those which lead to a worsening of symptoms. 

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January 9 – drug talk

/ Kokuu / 4 Comments

“I’ve got my tv and my pills”

— Julian Cope, I’ve Got My TV and My Pills (Interpreter, 1996)


I was sad to read about the death of writer Elizabeth Wurtzel on Tuesday of this week. She is probably best known for her 1994 book Prozac Nation which chronicles her experience of atypical depression and its treatment, and made her something of a Generation X icon.  Drawing on work such as Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, it is a frank and self-absorbed confessional which opened the door wide to that genre of writing.  The fact that her subsequent books did not do as well was partly due to the greater crowding of the marketplace under her influence.  It may also have been that an attractive twenty-seven year-old (her age at the time of Prozac Nation’s publication) and debut author was easier to market than an older woman. 

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