Do No Harm

I swear by Apollo the physician, and Asclepius, and Hygieia and Panacea and all the gods and goddesses … I will use those dietary regimens which will benefit my patients according to my greatest ability and judgment, and I will do no harm or injustice to them. I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan

The oath was sacred, and Rose had broken it. 

She had spent most of her life as a student and, eventually, a practitioner of the healing arts, hanging on nearly every word of that oath as a devout Christian would every word of the Bible. She had thought it would be a simple thing to follow, but, as it turned out, it was not. As she turned the tiny glass vial over in her hand, she wondered if the only way to right her wrong was to drink what was left of the dark, purple liquid within it. 

“Rosy?” The night was dark, somehow darker than Rose had ever seen it, and the chirp of cicadas nearly overpowered the soft brush of feet in the grass behind her. She didn’t move her gaze from the vial as someone sat in the dirt beside her, carrying with them the faint smells of rosemary and thyme. “Come on. You need to look at me.”

Rose shook her head, swallowing past the heavy knot at the base of her throat. “I killed them.”

Lucinda sighed. “Yes, you did. You killed them. Is that what you want to hear?” When Rose said nothing, she nudged her in the rib. Hard. “I didn’t think so. Look at me before I make you.”

Rose raised her eyes to meet Lucinda’s. They were big and green, her red hair creating a thin curtain in front of them as it fell from her braids. Her eyebrows were furrowed but not in anger as Rose might have expected. She was worried.

Lucinda grabbed Rose’s wrist and yanked the vial from her hand. She got to her feet and looked out at the cluster of houses below the hill they were positioned atop. Only a few still had lights on, the rest so quiet it was as if nobody lived within them. On the edge of it all, a few men were digging deep holes in the ground, their motions repetitive and disconnected. 

“You are the reason these people are going to get to live another day. Think about that.” 

Rose shook her head. She didn’t understand how Lucinda wasn’t angry with her or how nobody had come to make her pay for her crimes. Why had they just let her walk away? “I killed their children.”

Lucinda scoffed, turned quickly on her heel, and drew her arm back. She let the vial fly and watched, expressionless, as it shattered against the bark of a nearby tree trunk. “That’s one way to look at it,” she said, depositing herself back on the ground at Rose’s side. “If you want to ignore the context.”

There was nothing Rose could do to hold it back anymore. She gasped and allowed her face to fall into her hands as she began to sob. Lucinda’s hand on her back, drawing her into her arms, felt far away. It was like the touch of a ghost against the flood that was ravaging her brain. 

For weeks, a fever had swept through the village, and Rose, who lived with her family on a larger property just outside of the village and often tended to its people, had been called in to help. She had answered the call without hesitation, nowhere near prepared for what the job would entail. 

There was no indication as to where or how the fever had originated or if it had ever been seen elsewhere before. Nobody could pinpoint a patient zero—too many people had gotten sick at once, all without a common factor that could have resulted in their sickness—but the symptoms were too severe to be consistent with a mutation of an illness they were familiar with. People were vomiting blood, breaking out in hives and strange pus-filled rashes, losing their senses of smell and sometimes even sight, coming down with fevers higher than Rose had ever seen, and dropping dead left and right. 

Eventually, it had started to seem like the adults and older children who hadn’t already contracted the virus were immune to it, including Rose and Lucinda, who had grown up in the village and returned to tend to sick members of her family. But the small children continued to get sick, and the longer the outbreak went on, the more violent their illnesses seemed to become. Worse still, not only were none of them surviving, but their deaths were growing slower and more painful. 

Finally, Rose had turned to the last form of treatment she could think of. Belladonna, better known as deadly nightshade.

She had started using it on the children once they became sick enough that she could see no favorable outcome. She had played god. Now, the village was free of the fever.

“I know you think you broke your oath,” Lucinda said, “but you didn’t. Giving them the nightshade was a service, an act of mercy. Not harm.”

Rose lifted her head and shook her head. “I also said I wouldn’t administer poison.”

“Rosy, the oath also says you won’t give a woman an abortion. It’s millennia old. Not every piece of it must be taken literally or adhered to completely. You need only to remember the base of it: do no harm or injustice, help the sick, and abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm. You are the kindest person I know, and you did what you did out of love. To end suffering, not to cause it.”

“So I didn’t break the oath?” Rose asked through a shaky breath.

“No,” Lucinda said, wrapping an arm around Rose’s torso. “No, you did not.”

Rose allowed herself to settle into Lucinda’s arms, her body free of tension and the knot in her throat gone. She could see the faces of the children she’d treated, see their jaundiced eyes and their tear-stained cheeks, the pain in their faces. She could feel their pain just as clearly now as she had then, and still, she saw no other way she could have helped them. It was allowing them to continue suffering that would have been doing harm and injustice unto them. By showing them one final act of mercy, she had saved their dignity, even if she hadn’t been able to keep the breath in their lungs. In a situation where no choice was good, she had made the best one. Now, they could rest, and in a different sense, so could she.