I bit a piece of it off cautiously. The mysterious fruit was sweet.
"It’s hirsigyo. It restores the connection between the lungs and the bronchi. Now wait a bit."
The tabib went to a table, on which there were different vessels and a grinder for herb preparation. He ground the two plants he had given me and asked me to try it. I opened my mouth and almost choked – it was the same spicy bitter powder he had treated me to in his office that morning.
While I was laughing and coughing it off, Mukhitdin took a small can from a shelf and shook a few small round fruits out of it onto his palm.
"This is vildon. It grows on bushes in valleys in China. It’s a very valuable plant; we pay hard currency for it. It’s the basic remedy for cancer patients. As soon as the bushes bloom, they cover them with fabric. They build tents made of gauze to protect them from birds. If they were not guarded as well, birds would peck on the fruit through the gauze. Birds, you see, like them very much. They also use them for treatment."
"Is this what you treat Mama with?" I was looking at the black peas as if at some sort of miracle.
"Well, not just these, but we don’t know of any other plant which, in combination with others, can slow cancer development."
Meanwhile, Abduraim, who had left us, was already working with his assistant to prepare the combinations of herbs required for the day's prescriptions. I heard him constantly mumbling as he stood at the table. As I got closer, I admired his fast-moving hands. His assistant was taking the needed cans off the shelves and measuring herbs. It turned out that Abduraim was calling out their names. There was a green heap of herbs in a bowl sitting in front of the pharmacist, but they continued to add more.
"I’ve prescribed over 40 herbs for this oncological patient," Mukhitdin explained. "Don’t be surprised. There are combinations that are even more complex. There can be fifty or more herbs in a remedy."
"What is the average price of a combination for a cancer patient?" I asked.
"It’s expensive," the tabib nodded. "Some of the herbs must be paid for in hard currency – vildon, for example."
"What if a patient is poor? How do they pay?"
"They don’t," the doctor answered. "We give them the medication free of charge."
The grinder on the table began to hum. The scent of herbs was sharp, and I inhaled their aroma with pleasure.
"Stay here if you like," the doctor said. "It’s time for me to go." And he went back to continue his consultations.
I approached the shelves. I could see leaves with bulging veins in some of them, pieces of bark that looked like long entwined nails, roots in intricate shapes, long thorns, shrunken fruits, and even rocks that sparkled like pieces of ice.
“Oh yes, I wouldn’t call the work of the pharmacist monotonous,” I thought. Besides, everything was so beautiful, so many shades of colors and rich textures. There was something bright yellow, bright as the sun, and something crimson, like blood, on the table. Even the black color was attractive. It was not a boring black but rather had a deep undertone like a warm summer night.
"Why don’t you grind everything right away, so you have a reserve? It would take less time to put the different combinations together," I asked out of ignorance. It turned out that ground herbs oxidize faster and lose their potency and curative qualities. That was how the conversation about herbs and plants began. I learned so many interesting things that day that I felt like staying there for good and becoming the pharmacist’s apprentice. I would be lucky if I remembered everything they and Mukhitdin had told me.
No remedy on this planet is as ancient as herbs. It was not people but animals that began to treat themselves with herbs. It's possible that prehistoric people got the idea of using them from observing animals. However, there were also independent discoveries. Women, who were the support of their tribes, picked berries, herbs and roots. They learned about their qualities haphazardly, through personal experience. Ancient people lived surrounded by nature, in permanent contact with it. It’s difficult even to imagine how acute their powers of observation were. They knew more about plants and animals than contemporary botanists and zoologists, excluding the purely scholarly information, of course.
Hunters hiding in ambush saw a deer and different kinds of goats looking for and eating herbs and roots, sometimes digging them out of the ground with their hooves. As a rule, those were either sick or wounded animals. Or, for example, if they saw a deer with a bleeding wound on its leg eating red carnations, they would naturally ponder this and test its astringent quality on themselves later.
A wounded deer with arrows in its back disappeared into a cave. Hunters ignored it while they were pursuing other animals, assuming that the goat would die in the cave. But a week later, while chasing a deer, they noticed that it was the same one, the one with the arrow in its back. It was agile, healthy, not at all exhausted, the skin around the healed-over wounds covered with traces of dark resin. The curious hunters entered the cave, where they saw a dark, wax-like substance oozing from the cracks in the rocks, the same as on the deer’s skin. Those hunters, who were commanders in the army of the Persian king Fereydun, collected the substance and took it to the King. That was how the story was recounted in one of the ancient Eastern papers about how mumiyo (shilajit resin), the universal remedy that helps cure many ailments and is a powerful antiseptic, was discovered.
Information was collected, accumulated, and handed down by word of mouth. After these discoveries, collection of information and preservation of experience fell to many of most talented and clever people, and quackery began to crop up. The knowledge was handed down from teacher to pupil. It gradually became shrouded in mystery, evoked mystic fear, and was linked to sorcery. Over the millenniums of historic times, as that ancient knowledge passed into the hands of scholars, it was recorded and published in many languages, spreading from country to country. And, of course, scholars from different countries made their own contributions to the science of herbal healing. The characteristics and methods for the use of about 900 types of remedies and plants were recorded in “The Canon of Medical Science” by Ibn Sina. Some of the most complicated remedies were made with dozens of herbs.
Certainly, our ancestors could have only guessed, often quite sagaciously, about what has become common knowledge today – plants, over their lifetime, like all living organisms, produce between dozens and hundreds of biologically active substances containing various classes of chemical compounds. Yes, although the ancients didn't know about chemistry and microbiology, they brilliantly mastered the practical application of herbs, by observing the effects of the use of numerous individual plants and combinations. Methods of gathering and storing herbs, their drying, mincing and boiling, were developed down to the last detail. The methods for preserving the different qualities of plants were well established. The mixing of herbs so that some qualities could be increased, others decreased, and still others created, was fine-tuned with the greatest skill.
I had an opportunity to see for myself after trying the herbs that the tabib had used to make the fiery powder to cure my cold.
I didn't understand and most likely will never understand one thing – how could it be that herbal healing, in other words, using pure plants has been forced aside by treatment with toxic chemical drugs in almost every country in the world? Why has mankind turned away from mastering and improving the chemistry of nature and its powerful resources?
But then again, hasn’t mankind made enough monstrous mistakes and had misconceptions, strange as it may seem, related to the development of science and technology?
Chapter 18. Two-Three Years…
That was what the tabib promised me. And he did all he could, more than he could.