#this addition brought to you by my inability to be chill for five minutes

[bywandandsword]

This is actually a problem in Western medicine

I mean given Sumerians' knowledge of the world at the time, that would be a perfectly rational conclusion to come to, and a lot of soldiers nowadays still use similar vocabulary (being haunted/ghosts/ect.) to describe what they're experiencing

Where it becomes a problem is Western science's tendency to not take other cultures' medical practices seriously because they don't fit with Western science's understanding of the world, therefore rendering it 'invalid' or labelled as pseudo-science or magical thinking. This is because Western science wants desperately to believe that it is totally rational and unbiased (spoilers: it is not, it's as biased as every other worldview but we don't want to believe that because we want to hold onto our colonial notions of cultural superiority)

It's led to a lot of harm being done to people from non-Western cultures trying to seek help at Western medical facilities, generally because there is no attempt by medical professionals to meet the patient where they're at, which leads to instances of dismissing the patient's symptoms because they used unfamiliar terms to describe the problem, not fully explaining to the patient/ensuring that the patient fully understood what is being done and why and the patient gets scared and denies care, or in at least one notable case taking an epileptic child away from her parents because the parents were doing their culture's accepted healing but Western medical professionals viewed it as medical neglect and got her taken away from them several times

The book on that case is called "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures" by Anne Fadiman

Just, like, if we're gonna be on this journey of decolonization, we have to be critical of all of our societal institutions, and what knowledge is and is not accepted as valid, and why

Sumerian Veteran: *has severe PTSD but doesn't know it because the term won't be invented for another 5000 years* I fight the same battle in my dreams every night and my relationship with my family has fallen apart.

Sumerian Healer: *saw hundreds of veterans with the exact same affliction before* You're cursed by desert demons.

[torpublishinggroup]

Devilman Crybaby meets Marvel’s Venom in Exordia, the science fiction debut of Seth Dickinson, author of The Traitor Baru Cormorant. 

Ssrin Character Illustration by Julie Dillon

WHAT’S IT ABOUT

Meet Anna Sinjari, a refugee and disaffected office worker eking an existence in New York City. Her life is about to be upended by Ssrin, an alien with eight serpent heads, no qualms with cold-blooded murder, and an appetite for turtles (yum).

The universe is governed by seven passions, seven patterns which appear again and again, across species and across time. Anna and Ssrin are bound by the last and the greatest. The cosmos itself ships their very souls. Specifically for them, that means they’ll have to outmaneuver spies, armies, and government agencies to save humanity from a diabolical alien entity, hellbent on pinioning the souls of every creature on earth.

Exordia is expansive adventure science fiction that reads like a race-against-the-clock thriller in the vein of Michael Crichton, but steeped in the irony, humor, and pain of the Internet age. An alien-human epic for those who've always rooted for the monster.