cooling mudpacks: the aesthetic quality of therapy 189
rather than someone who has a particular disease that is indicated by these
symptoms.^18 It is suggested here that such an orientation, toward treating the
patient’s discomforts through realigning and compensating bodily processes
rather than destroying a pathogen, would lead one to consider how painful a
process of treatment is. Th e process and the end result in such an orientation
would likely be more palliative.
Th is patient-specifi c orientation may be declining in contemporary
ayurvedic practice however. Formerly, I was told, the ayurvedic vaidyan—to
use a classical name for an ayurvedic practitioner which is appropriate to this
context—mixed a diff erent medicine for each patient based on the patient’s
particular problems, and there are other ayurvedic physicians throughout Kerala
who continue to apply this method in varying degrees. However, numerous
ayurvedic pharmaceutical companies currently produce premixed, standard-
ized medicines, and few vaidyans or suppliers can fi nd the land or resources to
keep a supply of the raw plant materials and other materia medica needed to
create medicines at their practice. Th e use of standardized, pre-mixed medica-
tions may be leading to a propensity to treat disease entities rather than spe-
cifi c patient complaints.
It may seem a stretch to call on a literary analysis to help understand the
workings of allopathy, but it is worth considering whether there is some epis-
temological affi nity between the assumptions behind allopathic treatment and
the end-oriented nature of western fi ction observed by Frank Kermode (1967).
Kermode claims that a sense of anticipating an ending, that originally stems
from biblical accounts of the apocalypse, broadly underlies western fi ction:
“although for us the End has perhaps lost its naïve imminence, its shadow still
lies on the crises of our fi ctions” (6). Kermode’s examples from various periods,
including modernist fi ction demonstrate that authors narrate with a “sense of
an ending” and an orientation to time that assumes an End. Allopathic treat-
ment analogously appears to proceed while more fi rmly focused on an end
goal of curing. It is perhaps this sense of an ending that leads “modern” people
to rush and allopathic medicine to hurry—and thus overlook the quality of
the process. We rush because time is short or limited as we approach the end.
Benjamin Lee Whorf earlier made a similar point about the value of speed
being linked to ideas about time that are inherent in European languages.^19
Of course, one could argue that a sense of an end is always pre sent for all
humans, not just those raised in an apocalyptic, Christian tradition, and it is
not that the sense of an ending is necessarily lacking in ayurveda or religious
healing (although Hindu cosmology does not anticipate an end of time). Th e
diff erence may lie in the speed and the intensity with which ends are pursued.
A determined focus on the goal of curing can obscure attention to the quality