versimilitude, shamanism, & hospitals

[image: theophrastus philippus aureolus bombastus (c. 1493-1542) | portrait of the inimitable protestant doctor who in his thirties assumed the name paracelsus, meaning above celsus, a doctor working in first century a.d. rome.  a practitioner of derridean dichotomies, paracelsus rejected the orthodox, dogmatic pedagogy of galen and avicenna, and, like his contemporary, martin luther, departed from what he believed to be corruptions borne from the middle ages, returning to the original gospels- away from books, into the countryside, and into the alchemical workshop.  bound by the tensile strength of only his arrogance and a fair amount of ingenuity, paracelsus dismissed academic anatomy, ushering in chemical practices that challenged galenic humural constitutionalism- focusing on pathological ontologies from the outside, as assigned by the stellar]

paracelsus' doctrine of signatures is a metaphysical escapade and the early reformists' functional dossier of the wisdom of the countryside- a doctrine teaching that life was a perpetual germinative process controlled by the indwelling spirit of archeus- a sort of ethnobotanical map of the oral folk traditions and phytochemical diversity of his time.  a primary tenet of this doctrine was that like cures like, viz. a plant resembling an eyeball will have practical applications in treating disorders of the eye-  a bestowed power that was the signature of the creator.  far from a novel practice, this technique has been used throughout history, from amazonian shamans to ancient chinese healers.  this is somewhat paradoxical, though- his repudiation of classical anatomy, but his reliance on anatomy when adapting the morphologies of unrelated species to the shapes and forms of the human body.  he is a little like a shamanic janus- a dualistic, spiritual intercessor between god, man, and plant.

[image: www.guardian.co.uk]

applying the signature to the above pictured food of convalescence served hospitals nationwide, what can be said of the associative organ in the human body?  how are these functional, cost-based structures of corporate alchemy to breathe their trans-fat divination into my ventral extrusion- hernias shaped like the gambia inside senegal?  to be orthodox, perhaps the gastromorphic extrusions of surplus corn and mechanized aggregates of the cheese that goes crunch, with the appropriate food science intercessor, would be better served to nurse my visceral protrusion.