Savannah's Bethesda: Healing for All: Healing for All:

By WJ Crump

A Savannah native approaching retirement from a medical career returns home to write his sabbatical book. An encounter with Mae, a mysterious Gullah woman, takes him into magical adventures covering almost 3 centuries based in the landmarks of his hometown. The sights, sounds, history, and smells of Savannah are irresistible, and qualify th

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Crump
• Release date: Aug 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781088047002

Book preview

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Table Of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

About the Author

Praise for

Savannah’s Hoodoo Doctor:

The Tyranny of Dogma

tHE FIRST BOOK IN THE hEALING sAVANNAH tRILOGY

This inspiring novel by an accomplished physician and medical educator blends medical history, anthropology and introspection in the story of a man reviewing his life’s work and family relationships. The reader accompanies the narrator as he returns to his hometown of Savannah on a sabbatical to reflect and write. The vivid and poignant description of the sights, smells and recollections resonate, and even one who has never visited Savannah (beyond the scenes in Forrest Gump) will be charmed. The descriptions of the street scenes, salt creeks, landmark architecture and ordinary surroundings are elegantly detailed. Using the vehicle of magical realism, the protagonist visits early root doctors and subsequently blends examination of Native American and African culture with customs and Western medical dogma.

— David Bramm, MD.

Director, Rural Programs Huntsville Regional Campus, UAB Heersink School of Medicine

As a literary project, Savannah’s Hoodoo Doctor is long overdue. Hundreds of thousands of words have been written about Savannah in the past two decades as the city has turned itself inside out to exploit the success of John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. At last, a native Savannahian who knows how to weave and throw a cast net -- and is experienced in finding the best shrimp in the muddy coastal estuaries of Chatham County -- has written a compelling novel about the city and its people from an informed insider’s point of view.

Alternating between cool rationality and undisguised emotion, Crump explores the influences of family, history, education, environment, race and myth on an aging family doctor trying to reconcile the cold brutality and randomness of illness and death with mystical belief systems grounded in faith and tradition.

— Albert Oetgen is the retired Managing Editor of the NBC News Washington Bureau. He was born and raised in Savannah.

Savannah’s Bethesda: Healing for All

Copyright © 2022 by William J. Crump, M.D.

All rights reserved.

First Edition: 2022

Photo credit to Pam Carter

Cover and Formatting: Streetlight Graphics

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book blends historical facts, personal narratives, and fantasy. The engaged reader need not expend energy trying to determine which is which. Any similarities of any of the characters or their actions to real people, living or dead, is most likely coincidental.

This effort is dedicated to my mother who inspired me to reach for the stars to make her proud, my father who beamed his pride in me consistently, and my teachers and patients who joined me on the journey.

Preface

We are all products of our upbringing. I was near retirement from a long career in clinical medicine and medical education when this came to me in a most unusual way. I had studied the career development of medical students and medical residents, resulting in a professional identity curriculum intended to facilitate their journey. I had been asked to present a summary of our model to a group of brand-new third year medical students at another medical school. They had just mastered the enormous knowledge of the basic medical sciences and were on the precipice of immersing themselves in the care of patients. I had learned that this is a key inflection point, where some would go on to develop empathy and curiosity about the persons who came to them vulnerable and suffering, seeking help. Unfortunately, some would begin the downward slide from empathy to cynicism that comes when human suffering is reduced to organs, cells, and the body as machine. In different ways, prominent physicians through the millennia had said that it is more important to know what person has the disease than what disease the person has.

I had done hundreds of such presentations and never really planned much in advance, as I could just speak from the heart and the sessions would go well. This time, as I looked across the sea of bright faces and began talking about how important it is to develop a physician identity, things started coming out of my mouth that surprised me. I decided to share my own journey of identity as an introduction to the concept. I was further surprised that I started my story in grade school, when my identity was the good Catholic kid. Only later would I discover, as a senior altar server, how the richness of Catholic ritual and symbolism would animate my interest in indigenous healing traditions. Next my identity was the smart kid, and then it became clear to me that I was a boy. The medical student smiles urged me to continue. In high school I was the really smart kid who conformed to the expectations of my all-boy, Catholic, preparatory, military school; at least while at school. Outside of school I learned from elders how to weave and throw a cast net. Only later would I learn that this was an art directly descended from the island Gullah tradition. At my first job, I worked alongside those speaking Gullah, and they shared their ancient stories with me. Then I went to a college honors program at the University of Georgia that encouraged my thirst for knowledge, which had been first initiated in high school by the Benedictine priests. In Athens I discovered my love for science and especially physiology, making my switch from ecology to pre-med an easy one. Outside of class, I for the first time had close Black friends. Walking with them on the treacherous slopes of social interactions in the 1970s, I began to understand something of their experience. Also then I became close to a young biracial woman who shared with me her own struggles with identity.

For these medical students, sharing my experiences during my medical school clinical years was important. Each six-to-ten-week rotation in adult medicine, pediatrics, surgery, and OB/Gyn was a thrilling ride for me, and I woke up every morning ready to learn more. Towards the end of my third year, the decision about which specialty to choose loomed large. I honestly could not imagine leaving any age group, procedure, or gender out of my future practice, and almost by chance I discovered Family Practice. During my residency in Birmingham, I was mentored by one of the great founding fathers of this specialty. It was here that my love of medical anthropology took hold. As I used the biopsychosocial model to understand the wide diversity of patients I served, walking a mile in their shoes became real.

The students remained engaged as I described being the first family doc ever to have cesarean section privileges at University Hospital as the surgical aspects of my identity flourished. I discovered the unmatched exhilaration of helping bring a new life into the world. At my next faculty position in Huntsville I then let my procedural side grow and became very active with gastrointestinal endoscopy and outpatient surgery, quite unusual for a family doc at the time. It was during this time that my medical anthropology interest came headlong into Native American issues. My wife had always been proud of her Cherokee heritage and told stories of her ancestors hiding in caves in Alabama to avoid being swept away to Oklahoma reservations. But the understanding of the depth of this scar came when we stood before a display of artifacts from this Trail of Tears. I promised to learn more about this when I had time.

My next academic stop was as dean of a regional medical school in Kentucky, from whence the sabbatical story in this book proceeds. I continued delivering babies far longer than most docs, and loved every minute, even the scary moments that are discussed in this book. By this point the students in the audience were looking a little incredulous, wondering if I had made some of this stuff up. So I made the intended point that if you train as a generalist physician and keep your mind open, you can do almost anything. This administrative position gave me the time to delve deeply into medical history as I had always wanted. Many hours of study in musty old books allowed me to build a 6- part conference series for our medical staff and students. I was struck with how the dogma inherent in medical science served as blinders to important progress from ancient Greek times to the present. This tyranny of dogma formed the backdrop for the first book in this series.

The rest of the session with these medical students went as they usually do, and I got invited back, so I guess they weren’t too bored. As I drove back to my hotel and passed under oak trees hung with only wisps of Spanish Moss, I thought of Savannah, my home. That place, with a rich abundance of moss everywhere, formed me. In deep reverie about just how unique it was, I almost ran a redlight. It was in that moment that this series of books was born, but it was almost six more years before I had the time to focus and begin writing. The memories of complex relationships with my family and precious patients were unsettling, and for some I sought forgiveness. This wasn’t easy to write about, so I did research on the early history of Savannah as a way to get started. And then it all flowed out onto the page quickly.

This series of books will not be a comfortable journey for the reader who prefers linear progression. My mind moved seamlessly across time and space, as stories from my upbringing and those from memorable patients through the years are juxtaposed with the historical events that frame the magical journey. Only in retrospect does the concept of clinical jazz best describe my variant of stream of consciousness narrative. This concept holds that the accepted clinical guidelines, dogma that they are, are the equivalent of the written jazz score. The best physicians know when to improvise, riffing away from the score when needed to connect and heal their patient. My solidly Catholic upbringing in this remarkable town provided the score; everything that followed was improvisation, and each riff seemed like it belonged in the books.

So in the first book, Savannah’s Hoodoo Doctor: The Tyranny of Dogma, I discovered and shared the rich Hoodoo tradition among the Gullah peoples brought from West Africa, who thrived almost 300 years ago off the Savannah coast. If you look hard enough, you can see remnants today, and I experienced it first-hand in high school without having a name for it. In the first book I made a case that the Hoodoo concepts of healing are remarkably similar to the biopsychosocial model that I learned from the founding fathers of family practice. By the end of that book, I felt strangely comfortable considering myself to be a Hoodoo doctor. At the same time, I re-discovered the rich healing tradition of the indigenous Creek Indians near Savannah, and again made the case that these three healing traditions are much more alike than different. Bringing this healing comparison into the crucible of Sherman’s march to Savannah and the horrors of a downtown Savannah hotel turned hospital seemed a good vehicle. This second book, based at the Bethesda orphanage twenty years before the American Revolution, fleshes out details of the West African healing rituals. This requires an overview of the history of slavery in America, which remarkably begins in Africa almost a thousand years before the American Civil War. The third book, set during the Siege of Savannah, does the same for the Vodou tradition brought from what would become Haiti, and weaves in the remarkable story of Casimir Pulaski. The third book also dives deeply into gender conformation. To me these are all portions of the mosaic that has formed modern Savannah, and therefore, formed me. Readers can decide for themselves.

Chapter 1

I

knew I had to do

something. The restlessness had been overwhelming, and I was considering some options that could be dangerous. After over forty years of doing the same things, my best friend’s recent death and my semi-retirement from active academic medical practice left me bereft of direction. I had plenty of energy remaining, but if I was no longer someone’s best friend or someone’s personal physician, what was I? Tradition is that after seven years of service, academics are provided a paid break to reflect and write. I had been in my current position for almost twenty-five years, and never taken so much as a vacation day. Any trips I made to visit family were combined with meeting colleagues in that town or attending medical conferences. Reflecting back on how I came to be in this tiny apartment six hundred miles from home, I realized it started when I broached this sabbatical idea to my wife.

As always, she was supportive, but asked the obvious question. Why can’t you write your book here?

Sounding more like I was behind a lectern than at our kitchen table, I said, The concept of sabbatical requires the writer to be immersed in something entirely different from their usual routines.

She became very quiet and I could tell she was considering what this meant for us. Our commitment to serving as foster parents for special needs infants required her to stay home, but we both knew that given her former experience as a neonatal ICU nurse, she could do this without me. Although the tradition was for a sabbatical year, I didn’t want to be gone that long, and proposed three or four months.

With the same look that she gave me every time I suggested a move for a better academic position, she said, Okay, so where are you going?

I knew I had some unfinished business with my grief after my parents died, as I had compartmentalized that just as I did any strong feeling generated from caring for my patients. This is how I was trained, both by them when I was growing up and by my early medical mentors, and it was only just now that I had the emotional space to deal with the multiple losses that come from a full life.

. At this inflection point in