A doctor with extraordinary intuition

Father Matei told me about a very sick woman with four children and two elderly parents by her side. (…) To my great joy, Father Matei also began to visit her, unblessed, like me. I would go one day, he the next. The woman got better, but I still don’t know why she suffered. The news spread to the village[1] where there were enough sick people. We began to be taken by storm by all sorts of illnesses that none of us knew anything about. (…)

The priest’s daughter expressed her regret that we didn’t even have a book on folk medicine: I think we have one in the attic. She rummaged around and brought it down. It was the book of the empirical medicine of our grandmothers in the country, compiled by Dr. Vasile Voiculescu, our brilliant writer, and distributed in the cultural homes of the time. In his early youth, Vasile Voiculescu was a network doctor in the Buzău region, and he carefully verified the efficacy of the “native remedies” that make up the people’s thousand-year-old pharmacopoeia. His book is simple and ingenious, so that you can immediately find the illness and its legitimate remedy. In the absence of a doctor, as we were, it is a book of providence. When I saw him again 20 years later, I did not have the opportunity to give him great pleasure by telling him these things. The great poet, who was also a doctor of extraordinary intuition, was in agony.

(Nichifor Crainic – Memoirs, volume II, Romanian Literature Museum Publishing House, Bucharest, pages 121-123)

[1] The action takes place in a Transylvanian village between Luduș and Târgu-Mureș, while the author is on the run.