“Slowness” in the Anthropocene: ecological medicine in Refuge and God’s Hotel

Abstract

How do we understand the agency and significance of material forces and their interface with human bodies? What does it mean to be human in the Anthropocene, or what is being called the new “Age of the Human,” with bodies that are inextricably interconnected with our physical world? These are the questions that Stacy Alaimo poses in Bodily Natures (2010). Six years later, literary critics, doctors, and environmentalists are still considering the powerful and pervasive material forces of toxins and pollution and their increasingly harmful effects on the human body. This topic was first introduced by Joni Adamson in a monograph that signaled a turn in ecocriticism to environmental justice that considered toxins and pollution in the places we live, work, and play (2001). Alaimo (2010), Linda Nash (2006) and others took up that new direction to reinforce the argument that the history of the environment is intertwined with the notion of disease and with the issues of social class, gender, and race. Drawing on the perspectives of elemental/material ecocriticism in relation to disease, the environment, and bodies, this essay explores Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991) to analyze how nuclear detonation, underground, was constitutive of the history of what she terms the “clan of the one-breasted women.” After emphasizing the possible (environmental) causes and risks of cancer or other chronic diseases in the age of the Anthropocene, the essay then focuses on attempts to uncover the “underground” or alternative epistemologies of cancer and other diseases and their associated therapies based on a reading of Victoria Sweet’s book God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine (2012). Sweet’s professional experience acquired over twenty years of practice as a doctor at Laguna Honda, a chronic care hospital, resonates with the perspectives of other authors who are also interested in alternative and ecological health care and in notions of “slow medicine,” “ecological medicine,” the art of gardening, and mind–body interactions. In the framework of elemental ecocriticism, this essay argues that in picturing an era of anthropogenic culture and confronting invisible xenobiotic chemicals, Sweet’s elemental ecocritical thinking of medicine, bodies, and environment is not obsolete but perhaps an “antidote” to the suicidal tendency of modern society.