Submit to Divine Will When No Cure Exists

Submit to Divine Will When No Cure Exists is a Pure Heart Creed rule that, when a patient has no accepted medical cure, the proper response is to accept the condition as heaven’s will. Its significance lies in the dispute over what a physician is meant to preserve: Hohsalle approaches medicine as an effort to prevent disease and prolong life, while the priest-doctors understand their duty as safeguarding the human soul and avoiding treatment they regard as defiling. The rule is tested not in the abstract, but in decisions about a preventable infection for which Hohsalle has developed an uncertain treatment.

Religious and Medical Premises

Zolian physicians are also priests of the Pure Heart Creed, revered as “the fingers of the god.” Because medicine determines who lives or dies, their practice is expected to follow divine teachings. When priest-doctors judge an illness incurable, accepted care is to leave the patient in the hands of the god and administer only medicines that allow the patient to die peacefully. In that framework, not every possible intervention is a legitimate one: the physician’s responsibility is bounded by religious ideas about purity and proper human conduct.

Hohsalle first understands the practice as a response to the absence of any way to heal. He asks Lona whether Pure Heart Creed medicine leaves a patient to divine will only when there is no other means of treatment, then challenges him with the possibility of preventing rabies. Lona answers that he would refuse the treatment. His explanation is not that the remedy is ineffective, but that crossing the divinely established boundary between humans, dogs, and insects would create chaos. The disagreement is therefore about what counts as a cure worth offering, not simply about whether a medical technique works.

The Meaning of Saving a Life

Lona’s response overturns Hohsalle’s assumption that a physician’s first duty is to rescue every life that can be saved. When Hohsalle presses him on this point, Lona distinguishes preserving life from preserving the soul: the priest-doctors seek to save the human soul, not to prolong a person’s stay in a body they consider defiled. All living things eventually die; what matters to them is how a person lives the existence granted by heaven, not its length. Hohsalle recognizes that he and Lona lack common ground because they begin from different accounts of what medicine is for.

The rule thus does not mean simple indifference to suffering. Within the priest-doctors’ stated understanding, it directs care toward a spiritually acceptable life and death rather than toward survival at any cost. That distinction explains why evidence of a possible treatment does not by itself persuade Lona: the dispute concerns the moral and religious legitimacy of intervention, as well as its medical prospects.

Testing the Rule Against Experimental Treatment

Hohsalle’s method makes the conflict immediate. His treatment uses weakened disease agents to prepare the body to resist infection, but it is administered by repeated injections and carries risks. He tells Utalu that rabies, once manifested, inevitably causes death; twelve people treated with his method have survived without symptoms, although the approach has been used in too few cases to establish that it is risk-free. Utalu suspects that those people may never have been infected, while Hohsalle states that the dog that bit them died of rabies. The evidence is encouraging, but it does not remove uncertainty.

When Yotalu asks Hohsalle to treat Sulumina and Olimu, Hohsalle explains that the weakened agent burdens the body and could, in some cases, provoke a severe reaction with lasting mental impairment. None of his twelve patients has suffered that outcome, but he cannot rule out the danger. Yotalu weighs that risk against the prospect of mad-dog disease, for which there would be no rescue once it developed. The decision exposes a conflict between a religious rule against treatment and a medical choice whose potential benefit is real but not guaranteed.

Consent, Responsibility, and the Rule’s Limits

The choices surrounding treatment are made with risks stated openly. For another patient, Mazai, Hohsalle explains that the medicine may cause a severe allergic reaction and could stop his breathing. Mazai understands that the injection might kill him, but also that refusing it leaves him at substantial risk from the infection. He asks to receive it because he cannot yet leave his wife and children and would rather take the chance of a remedy that might improve his odds. Hohsalle does not treat that request as proof that the treatment is safe: he directs Makokan to have Milalle prepare what would be needed to respond to an allergic reaction before proceeding.

Sulumina’s treatment likewise requires care over who may authorize the decision. Although she asks for the injection first, Limuelle seeks permission from Yotalu because she is the wife of his younger son and Olimu is his grandson. Yotalu’s approval arrives before Limuelle returns with supplies in case of an allergic reaction. The scene places family authority and informed choice alongside the medical uncertainty: consent does not erase the risk, but it helps determine whether accepting it is permissible.

The religious position persists even when Hohsalle offers to show Mana the tiny organisms he believes cause disease. Mana declines, explaining that Pure Heart Creed practice does not consider identifying the cause necessary. For him, the patient’s body makes the relevant problem visible; illness is a form of defilement whose obstacles should be removed, and the physician should attend to the suffering person and help them live well. The contrast clarifies the rule’s continuing force: it rests on a distinct account of disease and healing, not merely on lack of access to Hohsalle’s explanation. The text leaves the two approaches in tension, with experimental medicine offering a chance of survival while the priest-doctors judge that survival alone cannot settle what ought to be done.