The First Nurse: HYGEIA

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Share healing water.
Sister, here is your calling -
Always in prayer.

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In the beginning of my career in nursing, I worked on the Oncology Unit of St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard California. I chose to start my career in this hospital because I wanted to work in a place that held prayer in as high esteem as nuts and bolts care for the body. At the time I entered nursing, it was no longer popular to call nursing a ‘calling’. The professionals thought that making it a ‘calling’ was a diminishing of the work. I never accepted that appellation as diminishing of the work. For me, nursing has always been a calling. It has been and continues to be about serving the people.

An ancient story coming down to us is the story of The Healer, Aesceplius. His daughter Hygeia was his assistant – perhaps what we would today call a nurse.

The image I share here is from Gustav Klimt. The piece is titled MEDICINE and depicts Hygeia – the first nurse. I do not know for sure what the symbols in the painting meant to Klimt. I do consider that the snake climbing a staff was the symbol of Aesceplius. I do know that the snake is a common symbology of the rising of the feminine shakti / kundalini life force which lies at the base of the spine and rises up the spine when called through prayer and meditation. Then in the rising of the life force up the spine - that true healing occurs - and the human becomes whole / holy. Some say, the bowl she holds represents healing herbs and this may be true. Some say that the ancients would use snakes to help them find healing herbs and this may also be true. However, what I see in this image is the life force curled at the base of the spine rising up the spine and then drinking from the luminescent waters of life.

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Hippocratic Oath: 

 
I swear by Apollo the Healer, by Asclepius, by Hygieia, by Panacea, and by all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will carry out, according to my ability and judgment, this oath and this indenture.
To hold my teacher in this art equal to my own parents; to make him partner in my livelihood; when he is in need of money to share mine with him; to consider his family as my own brothers, and to teach them this art, if they want to learn it, without fee or indenture; to impart precept, oral instruction, and all other instruction to my own sons, the sons of my teacher, and to indentured pupils who have taken the physician’s oath, but to nobody else.
I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrong-doing. Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Similarly, I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion. But I will keep pure and holy both my life and my art. I will not use the knife, not even, verily, on sufferers from stone, but I will give place to such as are craftsmen therein.
Into whatsoever houses I enter, I will enter to help the sick, and I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm, especially from abusing the bodies of man or woman, bond or free. And whatsoever I shall see or hear in the course of my profession, as well as outside my profession in my intercourse with men, if it be what should not be published abroad, I will never divulge, holding such things to be holy secrets.
Now if I carry out this oath, and break it not, may I gain for ever reputation among all men for my life and for my art; but if I break it and forswear myself, may the opposite befall me.

(This translation by James Loeb)

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