And Cure Me With That Which Is My Ailment (Abu Nawas)

I received a text message from a friend with a picture of him on a motorcycle. The message read “My present to myself for 2020.” I replied reminding him about the dangers of trying to behave like a 20 year old again. He wrote back “YOLO!”

YOLO? First I thought it was the make of the motorcycle, but a quick search confirmed that I belong to the generation who knows “Carpe Diem” but not “You Only Live Once”…

It made me think about an old question, however.

The YOLO mantra was what Abu Nawas, perhaps the most controversial epicurean-poet followed in his attitude and writings. Born in Persia in the 786 AD, he challenged the rules of Islam regarding alcohol and sex. Interestingly today there are beverage companies in his name, countless restaurants around the world, an Algerian LGBT  group, and even a street still popular in Baghdad.

… I was teaching a class in medical school years ago about the epidemiology of addictive behaviors. I always mixed anthropology and poetry in my lectures when demonstrating that many of what public health and medicine incorporate today were often recognized as part of human posture in various ancient societies. It was then that a student unexpectedly asked:

“Nikos Kazantsakis, in Zorba the Greek, said that to stop eating cherry pie you should eat them till you get sick. And Abu Nawas famously proposed that to get cured from wine drinking one should be given wine till so sick that could not think about alcohol again. Are these similar to preventing disease through vaccination? After all you prevent by injecting the disease causing organism in an attenuated form to build immunity.”

Ha! This was one of the moments that made me anxious to enter the classroom and hope that a curious mind would go beyond traditional course materials.

The word vaccine comes from vaccinia, the cow pox virus. In 1799 Dr. Edward Jenner observed that milkmaids in Gloucestershire, England who had cow pox pustules on their hands and forearms were immune to small pox epidemics. He took pus from these pustules and “vaccinated” otherwise healthy people in the parish and these did not contract small pox.  The concept of a vaccine thus was developed and later perfected by Louis Pasteur in 1885 for treating (not preventing) rabies in human who were bitten by rabid dogs.

Vaccines are among the best successes of medicine.

So, treating the illness with the agent that caused the illness is a concept that may run counter-intuitive at first glance but has implications beyond medicine and pathology itself. It is a philosophical proposition. If killed or attenuated bacteria and viruses can be protective of diseases caused by the normal or high virulence of these bacteria or viruses, can there be a parallel in philosophy or attitude?

Perhaps one can find many such attempts throughout human history, all being evaluated according to ambient ethical and spiritual values.

… And I recall my answer to that student:
             “All wars eventually end in peace, but can we call peace preventive of or a cure for war? “

January 11, 2020

©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2020