HSIB CRSS

 

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"Learn the art of patience. Apply discipline to your thoughts when they become anxious over the outcome of a goal. Impatience breeds anxiety, fear, discouragement and failure. Patience creates confidence, decisiveness, and a rational outlook, which eventually leads to success."

-- Brian Adams

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Monasticism, Herbalism and Empiricism

Visionary

She had experienced ‘visions’ since childhood, accompanied by pain and “a fiery light [that] permeated my whole brain…the reflection of the living light.” “As the sun, the moon, and the stars appear in water, so writings, sermons, virtues, and certain human actions take form for me and gleam.“ Her creative ideas often came to her in visions and formed the basis of her most famous work, Scivias (Know the Ways).

That Hildegard suffered from migraines was first postulated by Charles Singer in 1913 and embraced by Oliver Sacks in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. The jagged edges stars and shimmering lines experienced by migraine sufferers are plausibly similar to those depicted in some of Hildegard’s artwork. Jagged edges are characteristic of scintillating scotomas and were illustrated in1888 by Charcot and 1890 by Babinski.

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Hildegard documented “437 claims of medicinal uses for 175 different plants.” These included Mandrake root, which is the source of the legitimate cancer drug etoposide and played an important in Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward. Did she do better than chance in identifying true remedies? That’s the question posed by Uehleke et al in Are the correct herbal claims by Hildegard von Bingen only lucky strikes? A new statistical approach. They used a statistical version of the game Battleship, with its two-sided two-dimensional arrays of hits and misses, to generate a ‘hypergeometric distribution’ of hits. Even though she was more often wrong than right, “The hypothesis that Hildegard would have achieved her ’correct‘ claims purely by chance can be clearly rejected.”

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