I HEARD an interesting talk this summer given by a nurse who practices “natural medicine.” She was a mother of nine children who lived with her family on a farm in Virginia.

Years ago when she and her husband were living in Africa as Protestant missionaries, she had an awakening about the practice of mainstream, modern medicine.

One day, their little daughter climbed to the top of a pile of sewage that always stood in the village, sat down and put her thumb in her mouth.

The girl became deathly ill. She was evacuated by plane to a big, modern hospital where she was given the best possible treatment by the best possible specialists. The girl survived, but she was very weak when she returned from the hospital weeks later. The mother spoke to doctors in America and France, trying to find possible solutions. Nothing worked and her daughter grew weaker again.

Filled with worry and believing her daughter may slowly die, the mother went to talk to an old woman in the village. “This kind of thing must have happened to others many times,” she said. “What do you do for them?”

The old woman said yes, it had happened to others and she told her of a plant that grew nearby. That was the remedy, she said. The mother picked many leaves and used them to make a tea. She fed it to her daughter for days. She soon recovered completely.

Fast forward many years, the mother and her husband are out for dinner in America in the midst of a major “pandemic.” Her husband, with grave seriousness, tells his wife that their children could be removed from their home in the not-too-distant future if they don’t agree to allow them to get vaccinated for the virus. They both know in their wisdom that self-sufficient, religious families like theirs are, for many reasons, viewed as enemies by the state. And they both strongly believe the vaccine will be toxic. This nightmarish, dystopian scenario of their children being taken away seems actually possible. All that night the mother is filled with anxiety. She has a restless sleep. What kind of world are we living in? How could such a thing come to pass?

The next day she is working in the garden when one of her sons comes running to her, shouting that his brother has just been bitten by a copperhead snake. The woman rushes without even thinking twice to pull up wild plantain that grows in the yard. She rips the leaves from the ground, tears them up, chews them, spits them out and stuffs them into her son’s wound, which she cuts open slightly. She keeps taking the plantain out and refilling the wound with freshly chewed leaves.

She knows that plantain has been used for years to draw poisons out of the body.

The emergency passes. Her son is fine. So is the family dog, also bitten by the snake and treated with plantain.

It was a harrowing experience.

But now she knows exactly what she will do when they come for her precious children.

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