Nail's It #3

In God's Hotel  Victoria Sweet writes about Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco prior to and during it's remodeling. She wrote researched her PhD on Hildegard's concept of viriditas. In the chapter entitled "The Miraculous Healing of Terry Becker" she writes,

Not only did her healing take a long time and need a long time, but time was the most important ingredient in her treatment. Premodern medicine knew about that special ingredient; it was called "tincture of time." Almost everything, it had observed, healed in time under the right conditions. And the most valuable thing that Terry received at the hospital was just that: enough - that is, the right amount of - time, the right amount of time being time without pressure and without end.

Hildegard referred to veriditas and Victoria tried to understand what she meant by it, "I discovered that premodern medicine did have a name for this magical act that the body performs. It was called the vis medicatrix naturae, usually translated as "the healing power of nature." But this is not a great translation. Vis is related to vim and vigor and means the force of life, of youth, of newness. Medicatrix is related to remedy and  medication. And naturae does not  mean nature as in "Mother Nature," but rather your nature, my nature, Terry Becker's nature. It means the nature of us to be ourselves. So the vis medicatrix naturae is really "the remedying force of your own nature to be itself," to turn back into itself when it has been wounded.

The idea goes all the way back to Hippocrates, who wrote that "what heals disease is nature [physis]." And what did he mean by physis? Physis comes from phuo, which means to grow, and signifies the observation that a seed grows into the only plant it can: a mustard seed into a mustard plant, a seed of wheat into a sheaf of wheat. By physis Hippocrates meant the "nature" of a being to grow into itself; and it was, in part, what Hildegard meant by viriditas.
But like anima and soiritus, physis and the healing power of nature were exiled from medicine more than on ehundred years ago. They were victims in the battle between two completely different conceptions of health, disease and healing - mechanism and vitalism.