Ash & Honey -Season 3-Episode 5: The Border Country

 Hadrian's Wall was built to mark where Rome's authority ended. But the soldiers who held it were rarely Roman themselves — displaced peoples from across the empire, enforcing a line against peoples not unlike their own ancestors. Inside the wall: trained military doctors, real surgical instruments, an institutional medicine that could relieve pressure on a dying skull. Outside the wall: healers who knew the body through relationship, through land, through attention rather than instruments. This episode asks what happened when these two ways of knowing the body stood face to face — and what it means to carry both of them, the institutional and the intuitive, in your own healing. Alexandria Quinn Love brings her own history as a disability analyst into direct contact with the archaeology of the Roman frontier, and asks what tending looks like when some wounds need a system, and some need a hand that simply pays attention. 

 Let the burn teach you. Let the honey keep you.
 Until next time — be gentle with the body that carries you. 

Transcript

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Twenty-five years old. That's how old he was. A young man named Anopius Ingenious, standing at the edge of the known world with the title Medicus Ordinary, Chief Medical Officer, first cohort of the Tungrians. He never saw Rome, most likely. He was probably born in Gallia, Belgica, what we call Belgium, recruited into an auxiliary unit, trained and sent to the very last edge of the empire. A fort on a wall built to keep out the people his own ancestors might have resembled a few generations ago. He had instruments, scalpels, bone drills, a building with a courtyard for life, small private rooms to isolate the sick, a theory of the body inherited from Greek medicine and refined by centuries of military necessity. He had, by the standards of his world, everything a healer should have. And somewhere outside that wall, not far, a few miles at most, there were women who had never held a scout, who couldn't have told you a single Greek medical term, who knew the body through their hands, and the land through their feet, who could set a wound without a single instrument. And Nicky would have recognized two systems. One. We know that because someone who loved him carved it into stone, and the stone is still there. This is Ash and Honey. We are still going home, but today we go to the border. Welcome back to Ash and Honey, where ancient wisdom meets modern healing. I'm Alexandria Quinlove. Last time we stood in the sacred grove, the Celtic healing cosmology, the world before the split, where medicine and prayer and ecology were never separate things, pretending to be related. They were the same gesture. Today we're gonna go somewhere harder. We go to the wall, Hadrian's Wall, the literal physical frontier, the Roman Empire built across the northern of Britain. And we look at what happens when two systems of healing, two ways of knowing the body stand face to face across the line, one of them built specifically to keep the other out. Before we go further, I want to say something to you directly, listener to listener, because I think you deserve to know how this show actually works. I plan ahead, I map out the season, the episodes, the history, months in advance, because the research deserves that kind of care, and so do you. So when I tell you what's coming next, that's real. That's the plan. But here is the other half of the truth. This show is a living document. It is not a transcript I'm reading from a vault that was sealed before any of us started this journey together. Life keeps happening while I'm making this. And sometimes between one episode and the next, something rises up that I know in my body has to be spoken now, not three episodes from now when it's scheduled. So I want to foreman you, not so you'll be disappointed, but so you'll understand if an episode doesn't look exactly like I've told you it would be, it isn't because I lost the thread. It's because I followed it somewhere it actually needed to go. A show that never changes its mind isn't in a relationship with you. It's just performing a plan. And that is not what I'm doing here. I am talking to you from the heart, not from a script that pretends nothing has happened since I wrote it. Today's episode asks for that honesty more than most. So let's go to the border. You know that I have to say this, and I mean every word of it. Nothing in this episode is medical advice. We are going to talk about ancient surgical practices, about plants, about bodies, historically as scholarship. If you are dealing with a real injury, a real illness, a real diagnosis, please go talk to an actual doctor, someone licensed, someone who can see you, not just hear you through a podcast feed. This show exists to honor what these traditions understood. It does not exist to replace the people trained to take care of you right now in your actual body. Hadrian's Wall was built starting around 122 CE on the order of the Emperor Hadrian, running roughly 73 miles coast to coast across the narrowest part of northern Britain. It was not just a wall, it was a system, forts, mile castles, watch towers, an entire militarized infrastructure designed to mark, finally and physically, where Rome's authority ended and everything else began. And here is the first thing that should unsettle you a little, the way good history should. The people defending that wall were almost never Roman in the way that we'd think of it. They were auxiliaries, non-citizen soldiers, recruited from across the empire's conquered or allied territories. At the fort of Haustets, roughly midway along the wall, the garrison for centuries was the first cohort of Tungrians, recruited from Galia Belgica, modern Belgium. Later they were reinforced by Frisians from the coast of what's now the Netherlands and by a Germanic unit known by the name of its commander. Rome did not send Romans to hold this line. Rome sent people who had themselves only recently been on the other side of a different line and asked them to enforce this one. I want you to sit with that because it's going to matter for everything we talk about today. The wall was never a clean story of Rome versus the Celts. It was displaced peoples, garrisoned at the edge of an empire that had absorbed them, holding back people not unlike themselves. Inside the fort at Hostitz, archaeologists have identified a building they believe was the Wale Tudina Rius. Big word, and I hope I pronounced it right for you. But it was essentially a hospital. It followed a pattern found at Roman military sites across the empire. A central courtyard for light and air, a surrounding corridor, small individual rooms, cubercula, for isolating the sick, a design meant to prevent contagion centuries before anyone understood what a contagion actually was. And we know there was a medical officer there because his tombstone survived. Anichos Ingenios, Medicus Ordinarius of the First Cohort of the Tungrian, dead at twenty five. His title meant he outranked the regular soldiers, equivalent to a centurion. He would have overseen the capsari, the bandagers, the medical snaff beneath him. Roman military medicine by this point was genuinely sophisticated. We have recovered surgical kits from sites across the empire, scalpels, bone drills, forceps, catheters, an instrument called the Chiathiskus, a small spoon-shaped tool designed specifically to extract arrowheads without tearing the surrounding tissue further. Surgeons set fractures, performed amputations, even practiced trepanation, drilling into the skull to relieve pressure from head trauma. They boiled their instruments before surgery. They preferred rain water for medical preparations. They had, in the opium poppy and the mandrake fruit, real pain management, however inconsistent. This was not crude medicine. It was theorized, instrumented, institutional, built on a framework inherited from Greek physicians, the same humoral tradition we explored back in season one. And it had categories. A wound was a wound, a fracture was a fracture. The medicas assessed, diagnosed, treated according to a system that traveled with the legions from Spain to Syria to Britain, the same regardless of where the body it was treating happened to be standing. Now, go outside the wall. The Celtic healing tradition we explored last episode, the Bonfaza, the wise woman, the druid, the healer who was also a priest and a poet, operated on a completely different premise. Illness was not a category to be diagnosed. It was a disruption in relationship with land, with ancestors, with community, with the unseen. The plants were not raw material to be extracted and applied. Meadowsweet and yarrow, the same plants we discussed in the sacred grove, were gathered with attention to season, to ritual, to permission. Healing meant restoring a web of connection, not correcting a malfunction. Here is what the archaeological and textual record actually shows about what happened when these two systems met at the frontier. And it is more interesting than either Rome destroyed native medicine or native medicine survived untouched. Archaeobotanical evidence from Roman military sites across Britain and the Rhine frontier shows imported Mediterranean herbs, coriander, dill, fennel, summer savory, concentrated overwhelmingly at military forts and towns, far more than in the surrounding countryside. The army brought its own materia medica with it wherever it went, but separately, scholars studying Celtic herbal traditions have found that Greco-Roman medical writers occasionally recorded native Celtic plant knowledge directly into their own texts, not always credited, not always understood on its own terms, but absorbed, taken in, folded into the written tradition that, unlike the Oral Celtic one, was built to survive. So it was not a clean conquest of one medicine by another. It was something messier, and I think more honest and institutional system, confident in its own authority, quietly taking in fragments of the very knowledge it had no formal category for. While the wall itself stood exactly where it was built to stand, a hard line between two ways of knowing the body that never actually managed to be as hard a line as it looked. Anicius Ininuis had scalpels in theory in a hospital built for hygiene in isolation. Twive years old, far from home, treating soldiers recruited from half a dozen different conquered peoples on a frontier that existed because Rome had decided this was the line. I think about what he saw that his training had no category for. I think about that often. I need to tell you something I don't usually talk about. Not because I'm ashamed of it, but because it cost me something, and I'm still finding the language for what? Before any of this, before the podcast, before Botanique, before I was the woman researching ancient healing traditions on a microphone. I was a disability analyst for the state. And I want to be careful here, because I'm not going to tell you about specific people, not because I don't remember them. I remember all of them. But because those were real lives, real files, and they don't belong to me to tell, even now, even changed beyond recognition. What I can tell you is the shape of the system, the architecture of it, because the architecture is a thing that nearly broke me. And I think it has something to teach us about exactly what we're talking about today: a border, a wall, two systems of knowing, standing face to face and refusing to see each other. Here is what I mean by architecture. There were criteria, lists. If a person could check off enough boxes, a certain number of specific findings met in a certain way, they qualified for disability. If they couldn't, they didn't. The criteria were not built around what doctors actually see in real bodies. They were built around what was administratively defensible. I had supervisors who told us plainly in training that the more claims we denied, the more valuable we were to the state. Not the more accurately we assessed, the more we said no. So you would have a person whose body had finally, unmistakably failed them, who met two of the four requirement findings, not three, not four, two. And a doctor, asked honestly, would tell you two out of four is common, that bodies rarely line up with checklists built by someone who never had to live inside a failing body. The world did not care what was common. It cared what was written down. I had to look at the shape of an actual human catastrophe and tell it that it did not match the shape the form required. And I want to be clear about what I'm saying. I'm not saying that the system had no mercy in it anywhere. I am saying it had no mechanism for compassion, none built into its architecture, and technical compliance is not the same thing as human need. I was the body standing at the place where the difference became someone's actual life. Whether they kept their home, whether their children ate, I held a clipboard with someone's whole world on it, and the clipboard did not care. And I was supposed to become that clipboard. That job was already doing something to me before anything else happened. My husband saw it happening, and he's not a man who narrates feelings easily. Some of you have heard the talk about him, know that. That I would not leave my job on my own. So when the opportunity came to move to Texas, his reasoning was layered, and he's told me since that it was deliberate. Part of it was Marcus, our grandson that I've talked to you about. Ashley and her family were there, and Marcus's illness had finally reached the stage of where and being close mattered more than anything else in the world. But part of it, and this is the part he only told me much later, was that he saw Texas as the only way to get me out of that office without making me choose between my conviction that I should stay and my actual survival. He used one true reason to solve the other. I want you to sit with both of those reasons being true at once, because that is exactly the kind of thing this season keeps insisting on. Not one motive, but two, moving together the way the personal and the historical in this show are never separate things, pretending to be related. They are the same thing, looked at from two different directions. A car accident. We've talked about that. I was hit badly. And just two days later, Marcus was gone. Now I'm not going to walk you through what those two days were. Some things are not for telling, even on a show built on telling hard things. What I will tell you is what came after, because it matters to where we are today. I could not drive. I need you to understand that sentence is talking about because it's not who you'd think. I have driven across this country more than once alone. California to Massachusetts, New York to Georgia, Oklahoma. I took my daughter across country once, just the two of us, and we chose to follow Route 66 as far as it would take us. Not because we had to, but because I loved it. And when the girls were teenagers and the house felt like it might come apart at the seams, driving was the thing I did to put myself back together. I was not afraid of the open road. I was, if anything, more myself on it than almost anywhere else. And after that accident, after Marcus, I couldn't get myself to drive to the mailbox. That is not a small fall. I want you to feel the actual distance of it from a woman who could go anywhere alone by choice. To a woman who could not start a car without her body remembering all at once the worst things that could have happened in one week. And my husband, Dennis, saw that too. And he made the decision the same way he'd made the decision about Texas, without asking me to confirm it, without waiting for me to be well enough to weigh in, that we had to go back to North Carolina. That drive back is its own chapter, my spine in agony the entire way, losing control of my body more than once. Genuinely afraid more than once that my heart was going to give out somewhere on an interstate between two states that weren't home. We took every alternate route we could find to avoid the major cities because my nervous system could not survive the density of them. It was, without exaggeration, one of the hardest things I have ever physically done. And I did it while grieving a child that we had lost as a family and a body that had just betrayed me twice. And once we were back, this is the part I still don't know what to do with. Me, the woman who used to be the one deciding, now on the other side of the desk, filling out the same forms I had handed out denials against, hoping that this time the system would see what I could feel in my own body and could not yet prove on a checklist. It took two years to get an answer. They denied me. I had no choice but to look somewhere else to find income naturally and to find myself. And that's where Botanique came in. And I do want to tell you something about Ash and Honey. Botanique is a well right now because I don't want to pretend a part of this world isn't paused. The shop is shuttered at the moment, not gone, tended. We're in the part of building something real that nobody sees. The legal groundwork, the paperwork, the unglamorous architecture that has to be right before anything goes back on a shelf. It would be easy to feel like that's a contradiction, a podcast about ancient healing traditions whose own product line isn't currently available. But I don't think it's a contradiction. I think it's the same lesson this episode keeps teaching, just applied to my own business instead of my own body. The Celtic healer didn't write down the knowledge because writing it down would have fixed it, removed it from the living relationship between the tender and the tended. What we're doing right now with Botanique is something similar in its own modern, much less mystical way. Making sure the foundation is honest and sound before we ask anyone to trust what comes out of it. That's tending to. Tending isn't always visible. Sometimes it looks like absence when really it's preparation. When the doors open again, what comes through them will be built on exactly what this show has been arguing the whole time. That real care takes the time it takes. And you don't rush it just because waiting is uncomfortable to watch. The grove is not gone. I told you that a few episodes ago, and I want to bring it back here because I think it's truer now than when I first said it. The wall does not have to be made of stone to keep people out. A clipboard can do it. A list of criteria can do it. An institution can stand exactly where it's supposed to stand, fully funded, fully staffed, and still fail to see the human being directly in front of it. Because it was never built to see. It was built to measure. And measuring and seeing are not the same act, no matter how official the measuring looks. I was on both sides of that wall. I denied people whose bodies told a truth no checklist could hold. And later my own body told that same kind of truth in the same kind of system looked at it for two years and said no. I am not going to pretend that that irony resolves into anything tidy. It doesn't. It just sits there, plain and unbearable. The way the Grove's grief sits without redemption arc forced into it. Some wounds don't close because you understand them better. They just become wounds you can finally look at directly. Here is what I didn't have a checklist for and didn't need one. Dennis read what I needed before I could name it myself twice. The first time, he folded two true reasons into one decision. Get closer to Marcus. That was the priority while there was still time. And get me out of a job that was dismantling me because he already knew I would never choose to leave it on my own. The second time, after the accident, after Marcus, after I went from a woman who had driven this country alone more times than I can count, to a woman who couldn't make it to her own mailbox. He didn't wait for a diagnosis or a forum or anyone's permission. He just knew and he acted and he got us home, even though home cost us one of the hardest drives either one of us ever survived. There was no criteria he had to satisfy. No three out of four, no two out of four, no institution asking him to prove it. He just stayed close enough, paying attention closely enough to see what an entire state agency, with its training manuals and its incentive structures and its very real authority over real lives, never could. And he acted on what he saw alone, quietly, both times, without asking me to confirm he was right to be worried. That is the other half of the duchas, not just the land that remembers you, the person who tends you without being told to, who looks at you the way the woman in the grove looked at her plants, not measuring whether you meet a standard, just attending, because attention is the oldest form of love there is. Every minute, every hour, every day, every week. But I want to go back to that wall for a moment, because I don't think this episode is actually telling you to choose a side of it. Anikiu's ingenious had something the woman in the grove didn't have. Trepanation, a way to relieve pressure on a skull that would otherwise kill someone. Real surgical instruments, boiled clean, used with real skill. There are wounds that tending alone cannot close. There are moments when the most loving thing you can do for your own body is not to sit with a plant for five minutes. It's to go through the gate, find the person with the training and the instruments, and ask for what only they can give you. And there are other ones, the kind no clipboard, no criteria, no checklist was ever built to hold, that only get tended the way the grove tends, slowly, relationally, by someone who is paying attention rather than measuring. My own healing has needed both. The acupuncturist and the chiropractor I see now are not outside the wall or inside it. They are proof that the best care lives in the place where both traditions are finally willing to learn from each other, the way Rome's own medicine quietly absorbed the herbal knowledge of the people it built the wall to keep out. So this isn't a story about tearing the wall down. It's a story about knowing which side of it you need on a given day and having the humility to cross it when you do. I am going to ask you to do one thing this week. It's small, but it asks more of you than it looks like. Find one thing you are already doing to tend yourself. Something ordinary, something that doesn't look like healing because it's just part of your week. A walk, a stretch, ten minutes with a cup of something warm before anyone else in the house is awake. It doesn't need to be dramatic. The Celtic tradition we've been exploring didn't believe in dramatic. It believed in tending. Repeated, ordinary, daily tending. This week, name it out loud, even if just to yourself. Say this is tending, this counts. Nobody has to approve it for it to be real. Because the wall only has power over what it can measure, and the thing you do quietly for yourself on no one's checklist but your own, that was never on the other side of any wall to begin with. And then be honest and be fair to yourself. Evaluate where you are physically and emotionally, mentally, and determine if there is one thing, maybe more than one, that you do need to crawl over that wall for. In order to be your healthiest, best person. And if there is one, don't let fear or shame or embarrassment hold you back. Tending to yourself is a priority. Even if you need professional help to do the tending, even the most beautiful gardens need a gardener. Next time we go further into Pictus God, a culture that left us almost nothing in writing and everything in stone. I'm Alexandria Quinla. Let the burn teach you, let the honey keep you. And until next time, take care of yourself, my friend.