Chapter the Second
Visitors
Brother Matthew's Stomach
Brother Matthew shook his head violently, "Pomoc! Never mind that," he said, flinging his arms wide, "I had breakfast with Brother Tatras this morning and I happened to mention that I had a craving for black pudding. It is only natural. My mother made the best black pudding in all of Moravia and I miss it sometimes. You know what he said?" Both brothers agreed they did not know what the imfirmarer had said to Brother Matthew.
"He told me that my appetite was corrupted and inordinate, caused, he said, by an accumulation of phlegm in the stomach." He snorted, leaving no doubt as to his opinion of the Monastery's chief medical advisor.
"And what did he recommend?" asked Brother Joseph.
"He poked me in the stomach and said that my liver was swollen," Klacel continued, "Then he told me to take a pomade made of bitter almond, willow oil and mastic. It would ripen the rheum, he said."
"And have you?" teased Lindenthal, knowing full well how Brother Matthew would react.
"Of course not," thundered the monk, "I am a man of science not superstition."
"Vitiant artus aegrae contagia mentis," laughed Brother Joseph, "as Ovid would say." Then he translated the Latin for the benefit of Brother Gregory. "When the mind is ill at ease, the body is affected."
Brother Matthew agreed vigorously. "It is true, the body affects the mind and the mind affects the body. The two are linked. Natural medicine should be firmly based on philosophy. Hippocrates based his philosophy of human health firmly in the physis, by which he meant the 'organism' in its total unity. We cannot separate the elements of the mind, the body, and the soul from one another."
"But," interjected Mendel, "you forget the fourth element. From Hippocrates perspective, the 'organism' grows at the expense of the environment, taking its substance into its own corpus. Disease, therefore, stems from difficulties in the digestion or pepsis of the nutrient elements in the environment. This dysfunction is dyspepsia. To understand disease, you must first understand the environment."
"No," said Brother Joseph, "you must first understand the pepsis, the digestion, and for that you must first understand the physis, or body of the organism. That is the role of science; to understand the organism."
They had been down this road before, these three friends. In the nineteenth century intellectuals in Europe and England were beginning to challenge centuries of tradition and the reams of canonized knowledge that had guided human thought since the time of the Romans. Under Abbot Napp's careful guidance, the monks of St Thomas were stumbling and groping towards a new enlightenment, none more so than Mendel. But, without the framework of new intellectual paradigms, any progress would have been impossible.
Klacel was just hitting his stride. He loved debates like these; those that dealt with the unity of science and how the development of one branch of science affected all the others. In earlier years he had published, in the journal of the Prague National Museum, several articles at least one of which had been about progress in the social sciences, which he termed 'The Development of Science'. But today he was doomed to have his flow of intellectual concepts badly interrupted.