Summary Of The Book Of Medicine By Linda Hogan

As a woman of both white and Native American cultures, Linda Hogan’s collection of poetry The Book of Medicine, reflects how both sides are affected by white narratives. Her collection is about the illness these narrative cause and how creating new narratives we can heal from them. The first half of the book explains the destruction in the world and in our culture caused by “white” culture of separating from nature. In white culture, there is a clear distinction between “us” and nature and animals. The two, supposedly, cannot co-exist. Linda Hogan points to this as the cause for an illness among us all. In the second half of her collection, she explores the ways in which we can heal this illness by returning to nature. Specifically, she explores

They project what the fear within themselves onto the animals, and see killing them as the only way to remove that fear. To go deeper, Hogan says, “That night I saw the trapper’s shadow and it had four legs” (43). When we hunt and kill these animals, we are really killing a piece of ourselves. For many of us, these narratives are all that we know, but they are actually very destructive to our spirits. We have been taught to be afraid of the animals around us, but in reality, we are meant to live beside and in peace with them. However since we are made to be afraid of the wild, many of us feel like we are missing a piece of ourselves and are not fully whole. Another theme in Hogan’s poems is the separation between people and nature. In “History of Red,” Hogan describes the bringing over of western medicine which, compared to Native American healing practices is very scientific and methodological, turning life into a science of death.
“The doctors wanted to know what invented disease how wounds healed from inside

In order to deal with this fear, they destroy what they are afraid of instead of dealing with the connection they feel and trying to cope with it. However at the beginning of the second half of the book, Hogan points out that this approach to dealing with nature has been more destructive than helpful. In the poem, “The Alchemists” she says of western medicine, “If it had worked/we would kneel down before it/and live forever,” unfortunately it only drove us further away from our roots with natures and caused us all to feel empty and lacking in life