A medieval brain conceived the following ratio: in the midst of three doctors two atheists, at least, may be found—and herein the mistrust of the ages is summed in a few tight words. Healers may be observed to work alone: one shaman, one rabbi. Tribes trust their own kind, and members perversely are not allowed to trust one another.Lest his suspicion be found out, the healer would have us understand, if not in a higher power, we must believe at least in the mystery of his autonomous will– which cannot accommodate another healer’s nearby breathing. People the world-over have never witnessed permutations on this theme—the isolation of the individual, the confinement of the observing self, hungry for communion, a yearning for a lost other, each comforted by the healer’s gaze or touch, all hypnotic, knowing the intimacy is gone the moment the healing takes place, even as the trance is sensed still. The body, and not the mind, but the body with its intelligence quietly collaborates to subside the fever, close the wound, and arrest the bleed of rent vessels, to no applause; the body, too, yearns for unconditional communion. Bones knit blindly but into one another as if in their brokenness a connection remains for a time. Phantom pain, no rumor, commemorates the separation of limb from body. The feeling a doctor must know as he someday relies upon another physician, and not before his most dread hour of need, can only be imagined. “Mary, Jesus and Joseph,” lips murmur as salt in dry eyes burn. In Czarist Russia when three doctors confer three saints hold sway; it is a unique feature of this special place. And the saints, while few, are earnest. In the back of a great hall teeming with citizens of one mind, after a cheering crowd grows quiet and the leaders prepare to launch one more round of instruction—at just the right moment’s pause, from the rear of the dim large meeting place, as all eyes and hearts are opening, feeling safe and obedient, a lone voice yells “Nyet!”—and with it all momentum is lost, doubt is restored as colors every one turn gray; a winter’s long keeping again seems to be colder, and cold all that is deserved, nay somehow, all that is possible.