What Old Medicine Can Teach Us About Love | Corey Mertes

Explore a short story by Corey Mertes, built from fragments of a shared life; seven moments, scattered across time, bound by a single idea. Drawing on the ancient medical concept known as the doctrine of signatures, this conversation examines how people seek in others what they lack in themselves, and how fiction transforms memory into meaning.Corey Mertes is an American short-story writer whose work has appeared in numerous literary journals; his debut collection, Self-Defense, was published by Cornerstone Press in 2023.The discussion ranges from narrative structure and long-gestating ideas to the quiet, often unnoticed ways lived experience finds its way into art. Particular attention is given to the use of fragmentation as a deliberate narrative strategy: how a story composed of discrete vignettes can accumulate emotional weight over time, and how meaning emerges not from linear progression but from juxtaposition, recurrence, and omission. Rather than offering a single, authoritative arc, the story invites the reader to assemble coherence from moments; an approach that mirrors the way memory itself operates, unevenly and selectively, across the span of a life.The conversation also touches on the long temporal dimension of writing; how certain observations, encounters, and impressions may lie dormant for decades before finding their proper form. Notes taken in youth, anecdotes overheard in passing, and experiences that once seemed incidental are revisited not as autobiographical confession but as raw material, reshaped through distance and craft. In this sense, writing is presented less as an act of immediate expression than as a process of delayed recognition, where meaning becomes visible only after time has stripped events of their urgency and left behind their essential contours.Central to the discussion is the metaphorical framework provided by the doctrine of signatures; an ancient medical theory suggesting that the outward appearance of a natural substance reveals its healing properties. Though long dismissed as pseudoscience, the concept is repurposed here as a literary and psychological lens, offering a way to think about human relationships. The story proposes that people are often drawn, consciously or not, to partners who appear to correspond to their own emotional deficiencies; not as cures in any literal sense, but as figures onto whom the hope of repair is projected. This dynamic, explored across different stages of a relationship, becomes a means of examining intimacy, dependency, and the persistent human desire for wholeness.Featured in the Winter 2025 issue of The Brussels Review, The Doctrine of Signatures ultimately offers a meditation on relationships, healing, and the patterns individuals repeat without fully understanding their origins. It resists easy conclusions or moral resolutions, instead presenting connection as something provisional, shaped as much by misrecognition as by understanding. In doing so, the story reflects a broader literary concern with how meaning is constructed not through grand gestures, but through accumulation; through the slow sedimentation of moments that, taken together, reveal more than any single scene could contain.