Embodied knowledge - On the old medicine, the body's memory, and why we gather.
There's a question I've been asked more than any other, in different forms, over the years: How did people know this before there was science?
Before clinical trials. Before double-blind studies. Before the internet, before the books, before anyone thought to write it down — how did a woman in a Nordic village know that lady's mantle would ease a heavy cycle, that yarrow would slow a bleeding wound, that birch bark steeped in water would quiet a fever?
The easy answer is: trial and error. Centuries of it. Generations of women who noticed what worked and what didn't, and passed the noticing on.
But that answer is incomplete. Because if it were only trial and error, the knowledge would have to be written down to survive. You can't remember a thousand years of trial and error. You can't hold it in your head.
And yet it survived. It survived the burning of herbals, the suppression of the midwives, the rise of the pharmacies. It survived in the only place it could: in the hands and voices of the women who kept doing it.
There are two kinds of knowing.
The first is the kind you can write down. Lady's mantle, Alchemilla vulgaris, astringent, useful for heavy menstruation. That's information. It can be printed, copied, searched, scaled. It's the kind of knowing that modern wellness runs on — and it's why every brand says the same things about the same herbs. Information is easy to transmit. It's also easy to lose meaning, because it's separated from the person who learned it.
The second kind is different. It doesn't live in a book. It lives in the body. It's the knowledge your hands have when you've done something a thousand times. It's the way we know a plant is ready to harvest not by a calendar but by the smell of the air. It's the memory that returns the moment your fingers touch the same leaf your grandmother taught you to pick.
Philosophers call this embodied knowledge — a kind of knowing that lives in the phenomenal body, a pre-reflective understanding that doesn't need words because the body itself holds it . It's the knowledge of the hands, not the head. And it has one crucial property: it cannot be transmitted by information alone.
You can't read a book and learn to know a plant. You can't watch a video and learn to brew an infusion the way it was brewed before. You have to do it, with someone who already knows, in the same room, at the same time of year, with the same plants.
That's why the old medicine survived the way it did. It was never meant to be stored on a page. It was meant to be gathered. Around a table. Around a fire. Through the ritual of doing something together, the same way, again and again, until it became second nature — not because you were taught, but because you remembered.
The body remembers what the mind forgets.
If you've ever made bread with your hands, you know this. You don't think about the kneading. Your hands know. If you've ever jumped into a lake — you know, the knowledge on how to swim isn't stored as words. It's stored as motion. It comes back the moment your body enters the same posture.
The same is true of the old medicine. The daughter who learned how to make a reciepe from grandmother doesn't need to consult a text to know when it's ready. Her hands know the color. Her nose knows the scent. Her body knows the moment to take it off the fire.
This is the knowledge that modern wellness has almost entirely lost. We have more information about herbs than any generation in history. We have databases, studies, clinical trials, dosage charts. We have everything except the one thing that actually kept the knowledge alive: the gathering.
This is why we gather.
Around the table, we make the infusion. We pass the cup. We tell the story the same way it was told to us. We do it at the same time of year, with the same plants, in the same rhythm. And in the doing — not in the reading, not in the information — the knowledge passes from one woman to the next.
It doesn't transfer through explanation. It transfers through presence. Through hands. Through voices. Through the repetition of a ritual that was old before any of us were born.
This is the old medicine. It was never written down, because it never needed to be. It was gathered. And it is gathered still — every time we sit around a table and do it together.
Some things cannot be read. They can only be received.
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/oukan/2025/0/2025_13P2-F05/_article/-char/en#1
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/j.1467-9566.2009.01158.x#4#1
https://kaken.nii.ac.jp/en/grant/KAKENHI-PROJECT-16K03220/#1
