8 ms·

A doctor who treated Bach and Handel with disastrous results

134 points by lycopodiopsida 4y ago

pessimizer 4y ago
This is a bit unfair, all doctors were fucking terrible before the late 19th century, and lowered the lifespan of everyone they touched. They also seemed to prescribe mercury for everything. The only rational use for a doctor back then was if you needed emergency surgery because you were going to die very soon. It was a situation that they could only make better. The problem, I guess, is that the confidence and authoritative tone of doctors has been identical from back then, when their interventions were at best useless and on average murderous, to now, when they have some chance of improving your outcome. Upper-class people fell for it, to their peril.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  > and lowered the lifespan of everyone they touched This really isn't true.
- reidjs 4y ago
  I’ve heard this repeatedly, is there any proof doctors used to be useless? Why didn’t they work other jobs? Were they simply con artists?
  - shadowofneptune 4y ago
    That was certainly a popular impression in past centuries. In the book Simplicius Simplissimus (1668), the main character takes time off from the 30 Year's War to do some dentistry. He goes from village to village, using show tricks to hide to audiences how painful and damaging his operations are to his customers. EDIT: Some nonfiction: an account of quacks from the 19th century https://archive.org/details/monthylygazette00mdgoog/page/n376/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/monthylygazette00mdgoog/page/n37...
  - saghm 4y ago
    From the wikipedia[1] article on the assassination of Garfield in 1881: > Most historians and medical experts now believe that Garfield probably would have survived his wound had the doctors been more capable.[66][67] However, most American doctors of the day did not believe in anti-sepsis measures or the need for cleanliness to prevent infection.[68] Several inserted their unwashed fingers into the wound to probe for the bullet, and one doctor punctured Garfield's liver in doing so. Also, Bliss had supplanted Garfield's physician Jedediah Hyde Baxter. Bliss and the other doctors who attended Garfield had guessed wrong about the path of the bullet in his body; they had probed rightward into his back instead of leftward, missing the location of the bullet but creating a new channel which filled with pus. The autopsy discovered this error and revealed pneumonia in both lungs and a body that was filled with pus due to uncontrolled sepsis. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_James_A._Garfield#Treatment_and_death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_James_A._Garf...
    - john-aj 4y ago
      That only speaks for the 1800s, though. There were a lot of incorrect beliefs among scientists during that time that weren't commonplace before; race biology comes to mind. Soap has been around for a long time, and thousand-year-old religions have rules about cleaning oneself. My impression was that doctors actually stopped believing in disinfection during the rise of modern science, as they began see these beliefs as unscientific superstitions. I don't currently have a source for this, though.
  - Foobar8568 4y ago
    Proof, I am not sure, but Molière targeted a lot doctors in his plays,typically https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imaginary_Invalid https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imaginary_Invalid
  - t-3 4y ago
    In Europe, traditionally the local barber was also the surgeon.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      And for long time today's pinacle of the medical profession (if you go TV drama series), surgeons, were not even considered doctors to begin with.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1569979/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1569979/ That's a book review of a readable book that makes the case quite compellingly. > I recently read George Bernard Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma and experienced an unexpected sense of insult on behalf of my profession. In this celebrated play, Shaw serially indicts various kinds of late 19th century doctor—the hypocrite, the self publicist, and (most dangerous of all) the blinkered zealot. While I admired the plot construction, I suspected that Shaw had created such character extremes for comic effect. However, having read David Wootton's Bad Medicine, I am now no longer insulted and, on behalf of my profession, feel somewhat grateful to Shaw for his restraint. For, as Wootton painstakingly argues in this short but undoubtedly explosive new book, the history of medicine has been nothing less than a failure and doctors have been the culprits.
  - elliekelly 4y ago
    The BBC did a series called Victorian Pharmacy[1] where they set out to operate a pharmacy from the era and try out the various "remedies" of the time. If you watch the series you'll quickly notice a common theme: there are very few victorian remedies the show could actually try today because it would be unethical. And some of the cures they could try seemed a lot like instruments of torture. Like the Malvern Water Cure, for example, which starts at ~38 minutes in this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXnVTMzSy3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXnVTMzSy3s [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_Pharmacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_Pharmacy
- lofatdairy 4y ago
  I won't disagree that medicine has come a long way but I'm going to say that this is a giant disservice to some very great doctors in history. My favorite example is John Bradmore, who saved the life of King Henry V after he was shot in the fucking head with an arrow. Not only was John Bradmore a surgeon, he was also something of metalworker (and in fact, was arrested for making counterfeit coins; he had to be pulled out of jail to save the king's life). He used that skill to design a bespoke tool to pull the arrowhead out of the king's head, creating an antibacterial environment with honey and disinfecting the wound with alcohol (though this was before germ theory). Henry V would later go on to rule for 19 more years (he would die for seemingly unrelated reasons, heatstroke). By the way, this was in 1403. There's also a problem with your criticism in the sense that it implies that doctors were blindly confident, and not for a particularly good reason. While obviously certain incorrect beliefs persisted for quite some time in history, it's from within medicine and from other doctors that these views were more often than not corrected and updated. Obviously, Galen believed incorrectly that the human heart has sinuses from which blood flowed across and was filtered, but to his defense he was not allowed by the state to perform human dissections. If anything, the neo-Galenists were to blame (as Andreas Versalius so often harshly criticized, to the detriment of his Latin grammar, funnily enough). But it's only through the work of people like Ibn al-Nafis, Vesalius, and William Harvey (the latter two's frustration with Galen comes across pretty clearly in their writing) that we have the perspective to say that beliefs like Galen's were wildly off the mark. What I mean to say is, that it's very easy to say that those early doctors were far too confident in their pseudo-scientific theories, yet that's the nature of scientific knowledge and the epistemology of medicine; we know better only because of social changes, technological improvements, and/or particularly clever insights.
  - lqet 4y ago
    Here is an image of the tool: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EyiqN6UXMAAZbrM?format=jpg&name=small https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EyiqN6UXMAAZbrM?format=jpg&name=... I must admit it's pretty clever.
    - rob74 4y ago
      Not only that, but crucially (quote from Wikipedia): "Over a period of several days, John Bradmore, the royal physician, treated the wound with honey to act as an antiseptic, crafted a tool to screw into the embedded arrowhead (bodkin point) and thus extract it without doing further damage, and flushed the wound with alcohol." Despite the clever tool, if the wound had gotten infected, the then-prince would have probably died. So the knowledge of what to use to disinfect wounds already existed, but apparently wasn't undisputed until much later...
- atdrummond 4y ago
  One of the first surgeons to break this trend was Robert Liston, who practiced in the early/mid 19th century and was renowned for his speed and results. It definitely seems to me that they were simply unfortunate to be living in the time they were - I’m not sure there were many skilled enough in ocular surgery at that time to have actually aided in their respective recoveries.
  - DocTomoe 4y ago
    This was the same guy, by the way, who managed to have a surgery with a 300% mortality rate[1]. Sometimes speed is not everything. [1] https://history101.com/the-surgery-300-death-rate https://history101.com/the-surgery-300-death-rate
    - fhsm 4y ago
      He himself recognized when circumstances changed such that speed was less important. http://www.grandroundsjournal.com/articles/gr049006 http://www.grandroundsjournal.com/articles/gr049006
- qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
  Lest we forget, for surgeries & blood letting with a more positive outcome, the comon men went to ask the barber (thus the blood stained rotating poles). Doctors were really something only nobility could employ.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    By modern defibitions, doctors during medival period were more theologs than medical professionals. Barbers and mid wifes were the people to go to. Whej it came to non-organ surgery those were surprisingly good, guven theblimited knowledge and means they worked with.
  - 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
    in my city, there has been a centures old tradition of old greek medicine which is actually practices still today in small cases. the barber is interesting because our physicians were doctors of greek medicine while the surgeons were called literally "barbers" or "naevid" in kashmiri. these were the two types of medical professionals until modern medicine was brought by christian missionaries around 200 years ago.
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    > Doctors were really something only nobility could employ. Not true. The concept of hospices civils existed for centuries in western europe and were usually supported by religious organizations.
- eru 4y ago
  > The only rational use for a doctor back then was if you needed emergency surgery because you were going to die very soon. It was a situation that they could only make better. Didn't you go for a barber for these kinds of problems anyway? Or later on, to a surgeon, who was very much not a doctor.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    That's me making excuses for doctors since we include surgeons with doctors now, so I gave doctors credit for surgeons' work then. Anatomists and surgeons were actually accomplishing something in medicine, so although surgeons would still kill you half the time, if you were dying anyway a coin-flip's chance was a blessing.
- jcl 4y ago
  I was impressed by the story of Phineas Gage, a railroad worker who, in 1848, accidentally had a gunpowder tamping iron blasted through his head. A doctor was somehow able to treat the wound, such that he was able to make a near-complete recovery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    rail spike through the dome definitely puts you in the "you needed emergency surgery because you were going to die very soon" category. you're going to the doctor no matter what because they can't plausibly make your life worse at that point.
- hgomersall 4y ago
  I suspect it's rather like economics today. There were likely a fair few practitioners at the periphery that were well aware of just how dangerously wrong the orthodox views were, but they were largely ignored.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- vanattab 4y ago
  So of the things it we think of as antiquated an unhelpful such as using maggots to clean infected wounds and what not is actually making a comeback. Maggots are every good at dissolving and consuming dead/infected flesh and produce dozens of anti microbial compounds. And me be a critical tool as various strains develop resistance to antibiotics.
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    This comes up a lot because it's like the one single example and it's viscerally striking. Are there other examples though?
    - cma 4y ago
      Medical leeches.
Gatsky 4y ago
The writing in this chap’s substack is a joy to read. It has the rare quality of being exactly the right length. The author also did a great podcast with Tyler Cowen.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
P-NP 4y ago
Quote from the article: "Dr. Taylor’s standard procedure included administering laxatives and bloodletting from the patient. In addition, Taylor used the blood from slaughtered pigeons as eye drops, and often applied a baked apple to the eye with a bandage. Adding to the abuse, he charged large sums for his procedures—especially if he judged that the patient was wealthy. Bach survived a few weeks after the second procedure, but it seems likely that these failed eye operations directly caused his rapid decline and death. Taylor’s approach was extremely unhygienic, and thus likely to lead to post-surgical infections. I remind readers that antibiotics didn’t exist back then, and an infection, once it had set in, was often fatal. In any event, Bach died on July 28, 1750 at age 65."
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rob74 4y ago
  You have to remember that's pretty much par for the course for that age. One classic example is the "care" that was administered to George Washington, which likely also hastened his demise: "Doctors then arrived and bled him four more times over the next eight hours, with a total blood loss of 40 percent. Washington also gargled with a mixture of molasses, vinegar and butter; he inhaled a steam of vinegar and hot water; and his throat also was swabbed with a salve and a preparation of dried beetles. An enema was also used." (from https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/the-mysterious-death-of-george-washington https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/the-mysterious-death-of-...)
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    I don't think the argument that "we have a lot of records of this behavior so it was normal" is persuasive, for the reason that our records aren't an even slice of history. We have much much more record of what rich people did and were affected by, and much less about everyone else. It may have been, probably was, normal for wealthy people to subject themselves to this sort of treatment. But I think the majority of people would have seen a local barber, midwife, or healer, who had different traditions that may not have been more effective but seemed to have generally favored less invasive interventions. The majority of people probably just sat at home and hoped for the best, which likely had better outcomes than what the rich were paying doctors to do to them.
Tepix 4y ago
Nice piece. The guy's name is Georg Friedrich Händel, not Handel. Even if you don't have that letter on your keyboard, you can still find ways to enter it: https://www.confidentgerman.com/how-to-write-umlaut-a-u-o-s-without-a-german-keyboard/ https://www.confidentgerman.com/how-to-write-umlaut-a-u-o-s-...
- Asooka 4y ago
  Or just spell it Haendel. Though I've found that's a losing battle with the English world.
  - rob74 4y ago
    Then you have an ambiguity between names where the Umlaut is replaced with "ae"/"oe"/"ue" (Haendel) and names that are actually written with "ae"/"oe"/"ue" (Goethe)...
    - eru 4y ago
      Yes, but nonetheless that's the official rule for German.
    - beeforpork 4y ago
      There is nothing ambiguous about it, because it's the same pronunciation. It's a convention of how this particular name is spelled. But does German have ambiguities here? Yes, it does. In the instrument 'Oboe', the 'oe' is pronounced as two syllables: long 'o' plus schwa. It cannot be written with 'ö'. It should better be written 'Obohe' (my controversial proposal). And dialectally/regionally, 'oe' may be long 'o' instead of the 'ö' sound, like in the city of 'Soest', which could be written 'Sohst', but then people from that city would complain (about tradition, maybe).
      - nominusllc 4y ago
        there is no schwa in oboe, its oh-bow not oh-bow-uh ō′bō <-- see? From the American Heritage Dictionary 5th-ed. A schwa is the upside down 'e' which is not present.
AzzieElbab 4y ago
I keep wondering what will be written about out current state on medicine a couple of centuries later
- avgDev 4y ago
  Probably in a negative light. Many doctors now believe if they cannot test for something, it doesn't exist. This has been changing with long covid. Western medicine is in a weird place. It is based on science but sometimes it takes a very long time for science and information to trickle down to doctors....like decades. Then, there are pharma reps who sway doctors with new treatments, with questionable research.
  - AzzieElbab 4y ago
    Looking at my original post, clearly modern medicine didn’t do much for my dyslexia:)
sriku 4y ago
I was amused that the article claimed that loss of eyesight would end an era of music when Beethoven's loss of hearing certainly didn't end his compositional ability.
- ptha 4y ago
  You're probably already aware, there is evidence that Beethoven was not completely deaf. According to a leading Beethoven expert, the composer still had hearing in his left ear until shortly before his death in 1827. “Not only was Beethoven not completely deaf at the premiere of his Ninth Symphony in May 1824, he could hear, although increasingly faintly, for at least two years afterwards, probably through the last premiere that he would supervise, his String Quartet in B-flat, Op 130, in March 1826,” Albrecht said. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/feb/01/beethoven-not-completely-deaf-says-musicologist https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/feb/01/beethoven-not-...
  - sriku 4y ago
    Sure yeah. The first part of my comment isn't dependent on Beethoven's full loss of hearing though --- loss of eyesight ending an era of music still sounds a rather hilarious statement to me :)

This is a bit unfair, all doctors were fucking terrible before the late 19th century, and lowered the lifespan of everyone they touched. They also seemed to prescribe mercury for everything. The only rational use for a doctor back then was if you needed emergency surgery because you were going to die very soon. It was a situation that they could only make better. The problem, I guess, is that the confidence and authoritative tone of doctors has been identical from back then, when their interventions were at best useless and on average murderous, to now, when they have some chance of improving your outcome. Upper-class people fell for it, to their peril.

jacquesm 4y ago
> and lowered the lifespan of everyone they touched This really isn't true.
reidjs 4y ago
I’ve heard this repeatedly, is there any proof doctors used to be useless? Why didn’t they work other jobs? Were they simply con artists?
- shadowofneptune 4y ago
  That was certainly a popular impression in past centuries. In the book Simplicius Simplissimus (1668), the main character takes time off from the 30 Year's War to do some dentistry. He goes from village to village, using show tricks to hide to audiences how painful and damaging his operations are to his customers. EDIT: Some nonfiction: an account of quacks from the 19th century https://archive.org/details/monthylygazette00mdgoog/page/n376/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/monthylygazette00mdgoog/page/n37...
- saghm 4y ago
  From the wikipedia[1] article on the assassination of Garfield in 1881: > Most historians and medical experts now believe that Garfield probably would have survived his wound had the doctors been more capable.[66][67] However, most American doctors of the day did not believe in anti-sepsis measures or the need for cleanliness to prevent infection.[68] Several inserted their unwashed fingers into the wound to probe for the bullet, and one doctor punctured Garfield's liver in doing so. Also, Bliss had supplanted Garfield's physician Jedediah Hyde Baxter. Bliss and the other doctors who attended Garfield had guessed wrong about the path of the bullet in his body; they had probed rightward into his back instead of leftward, missing the location of the bullet but creating a new channel which filled with pus. The autopsy discovered this error and revealed pneumonia in both lungs and a body that was filled with pus due to uncontrolled sepsis. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_James_A._Garfield#Treatment_and_death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_James_A._Garf...
  - john-aj 4y ago
    That only speaks for the 1800s, though. There were a lot of incorrect beliefs among scientists during that time that weren't commonplace before; race biology comes to mind. Soap has been around for a long time, and thousand-year-old religions have rules about cleaning oneself. My impression was that doctors actually stopped believing in disinfection during the rise of modern science, as they began see these beliefs as unscientific superstitions. I don't currently have a source for this, though.
- Foobar8568 4y ago
  Proof, I am not sure, but Molière targeted a lot doctors in his plays,typically https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imaginary_Invalid https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imaginary_Invalid
- t-3 4y ago
  In Europe, traditionally the local barber was also the surgeon.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    And for long time today's pinacle of the medical profession (if you go TV drama series), surgeons, were not even considered doctors to begin with.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1569979/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1569979/ That's a book review of a readable book that makes the case quite compellingly. > I recently read George Bernard Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma and experienced an unexpected sense of insult on behalf of my profession. In this celebrated play, Shaw serially indicts various kinds of late 19th century doctor—the hypocrite, the self publicist, and (most dangerous of all) the blinkered zealot. While I admired the plot construction, I suspected that Shaw had created such character extremes for comic effect. However, having read David Wootton's Bad Medicine, I am now no longer insulted and, on behalf of my profession, feel somewhat grateful to Shaw for his restraint. For, as Wootton painstakingly argues in this short but undoubtedly explosive new book, the history of medicine has been nothing less than a failure and doctors have been the culprits.
- elliekelly 4y ago
  The BBC did a series called Victorian Pharmacy[1] where they set out to operate a pharmacy from the era and try out the various "remedies" of the time. If you watch the series you'll quickly notice a common theme: there are very few victorian remedies the show could actually try today because it would be unethical. And some of the cures they could try seemed a lot like instruments of torture. Like the Malvern Water Cure, for example, which starts at ~38 minutes in this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXnVTMzSy3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXnVTMzSy3s [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_Pharmacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_Pharmacy
lofatdairy 4y ago
I won't disagree that medicine has come a long way but I'm going to say that this is a giant disservice to some very great doctors in history. My favorite example is John Bradmore, who saved the life of King Henry V after he was shot in the fucking head with an arrow. Not only was John Bradmore a surgeon, he was also something of metalworker (and in fact, was arrested for making counterfeit coins; he had to be pulled out of jail to save the king's life). He used that skill to design a bespoke tool to pull the arrowhead out of the king's head, creating an antibacterial environment with honey and disinfecting the wound with alcohol (though this was before germ theory). Henry V would later go on to rule for 19 more years (he would die for seemingly unrelated reasons, heatstroke). By the way, this was in 1403. There's also a problem with your criticism in the sense that it implies that doctors were blindly confident, and not for a particularly good reason. While obviously certain incorrect beliefs persisted for quite some time in history, it's from within medicine and from other doctors that these views were more often than not corrected and updated. Obviously, Galen believed incorrectly that the human heart has sinuses from which blood flowed across and was filtered, but to his defense he was not allowed by the state to perform human dissections. If anything, the neo-Galenists were to blame (as Andreas Versalius so often harshly criticized, to the detriment of his Latin grammar, funnily enough). But it's only through the work of people like Ibn al-Nafis, Vesalius, and William Harvey (the latter two's frustration with Galen comes across pretty clearly in their writing) that we have the perspective to say that beliefs like Galen's were wildly off the mark. What I mean to say is, that it's very easy to say that those early doctors were far too confident in their pseudo-scientific theories, yet that's the nature of scientific knowledge and the epistemology of medicine; we know better only because of social changes, technological improvements, and/or particularly clever insights.
- lqet 4y ago
  Here is an image of the tool: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EyiqN6UXMAAZbrM?format=jpg&name=small https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EyiqN6UXMAAZbrM?format=jpg&name=... I must admit it's pretty clever.
  - rob74 4y ago
    Not only that, but crucially (quote from Wikipedia): "Over a period of several days, John Bradmore, the royal physician, treated the wound with honey to act as an antiseptic, crafted a tool to screw into the embedded arrowhead (bodkin point) and thus extract it without doing further damage, and flushed the wound with alcohol." Despite the clever tool, if the wound had gotten infected, the then-prince would have probably died. So the knowledge of what to use to disinfect wounds already existed, but apparently wasn't undisputed until much later...
atdrummond 4y ago
One of the first surgeons to break this trend was Robert Liston, who practiced in the early/mid 19th century and was renowned for his speed and results. It definitely seems to me that they were simply unfortunate to be living in the time they were - I’m not sure there were many skilled enough in ocular surgery at that time to have actually aided in their respective recoveries.
- DocTomoe 4y ago
  This was the same guy, by the way, who managed to have a surgery with a 300% mortality rate[1]. Sometimes speed is not everything. [1] https://history101.com/the-surgery-300-death-rate https://history101.com/the-surgery-300-death-rate
  - fhsm 4y ago
    He himself recognized when circumstances changed such that speed was less important. http://www.grandroundsjournal.com/articles/gr049006 http://www.grandroundsjournal.com/articles/gr049006
qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
Lest we forget, for surgeries & blood letting with a more positive outcome, the comon men went to ask the barber (thus the blood stained rotating poles). Doctors were really something only nobility could employ.
- hef19898 4y ago
  By modern defibitions, doctors during medival period were more theologs than medical professionals. Barbers and mid wifes were the people to go to. Whej it came to non-organ surgery those were surprisingly good, guven theblimited knowledge and means they worked with.
- 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
  in my city, there has been a centures old tradition of old greek medicine which is actually practices still today in small cases. the barber is interesting because our physicians were doctors of greek medicine while the surgeons were called literally "barbers" or "naevid" in kashmiri. these were the two types of medical professionals until modern medicine was brought by christian missionaries around 200 years ago.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  > Doctors were really something only nobility could employ. Not true. The concept of hospices civils existed for centuries in western europe and were usually supported by religious organizations.
eru 4y ago
> The only rational use for a doctor back then was if you needed emergency surgery because you were going to die very soon. It was a situation that they could only make better. Didn't you go for a barber for these kinds of problems anyway? Or later on, to a surgeon, who was very much not a doctor.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  That's me making excuses for doctors since we include surgeons with doctors now, so I gave doctors credit for surgeons' work then. Anatomists and surgeons were actually accomplishing something in medicine, so although surgeons would still kill you half the time, if you were dying anyway a coin-flip's chance was a blessing.
jcl 4y ago
I was impressed by the story of Phineas Gage, a railroad worker who, in 1848, accidentally had a gunpowder tamping iron blasted through his head. A doctor was somehow able to treat the wound, such that he was able to make a near-complete recovery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  rail spike through the dome definitely puts you in the "you needed emergency surgery because you were going to die very soon" category. you're going to the doctor no matter what because they can't plausibly make your life worse at that point.
hgomersall 4y ago
I suspect it's rather like economics today. There were likely a fair few practitioners at the periphery that were well aware of just how dangerously wrong the orthodox views were, but they were largely ignored.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
vanattab 4y ago
So of the things it we think of as antiquated an unhelpful such as using maggots to clean infected wounds and what not is actually making a comeback. Maggots are every good at dissolving and consuming dead/infected flesh and produce dozens of anti microbial compounds. And me be a critical tool as various strains develop resistance to antibiotics.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  This comes up a lot because it's like the one single example and it's viscerally striking. Are there other examples though?
  - cma 4y ago
    Medical leeches.

Gatsky 4y ago

The writing in this chap’s substack is a joy to read. It has the rare quality of being exactly the right length. The author also did a great podcast with Tyler Cowen.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

P-NP 4y ago

Quote from the article: "Dr. Taylor’s standard procedure included administering laxatives and bloodletting from the patient. In addition, Taylor used the blood from slaughtered pigeons as eye drops, and often applied a baked apple to the eye with a bandage. Adding to the abuse, he charged large sums for his procedures—especially if he judged that the patient was wealthy. Bach survived a few weeks after the second procedure, but it seems likely that these failed eye operations directly caused his rapid decline and death. Taylor’s approach was extremely unhygienic, and thus likely to lead to post-surgical infections. I remind readers that antibiotics didn’t exist back then, and an infection, once it had set in, was often fatal. In any event, Bach died on July 28, 1750 at age 65."

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rob74 4y ago
You have to remember that's pretty much par for the course for that age. One classic example is the "care" that was administered to George Washington, which likely also hastened his demise: "Doctors then arrived and bled him four more times over the next eight hours, with a total blood loss of 40 percent. Washington also gargled with a mixture of molasses, vinegar and butter; he inhaled a steam of vinegar and hot water; and his throat also was swabbed with a salve and a preparation of dried beetles. An enema was also used." (from https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/the-mysterious-death-of-george-washington https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/the-mysterious-death-of-...)
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  I don't think the argument that "we have a lot of records of this behavior so it was normal" is persuasive, for the reason that our records aren't an even slice of history. We have much much more record of what rich people did and were affected by, and much less about everyone else. It may have been, probably was, normal for wealthy people to subject themselves to this sort of treatment. But I think the majority of people would have seen a local barber, midwife, or healer, who had different traditions that may not have been more effective but seemed to have generally favored less invasive interventions. The majority of people probably just sat at home and hoped for the best, which likely had better outcomes than what the rich were paying doctors to do to them.

Tepix 4y ago

Nice piece. The guy's name is Georg Friedrich Händel, not Handel. Even if you don't have that letter on your keyboard, you can still find ways to enter it: https://www.confidentgerman.com/how-to-write-umlaut-a-u-o-s-without-a-german-keyboard/ https://www.confidentgerman.com/how-to-write-umlaut-a-u-o-s-...

Asooka 4y ago
Or just spell it Haendel. Though I've found that's a losing battle with the English world.
- rob74 4y ago
  Then you have an ambiguity between names where the Umlaut is replaced with "ae"/"oe"/"ue" (Haendel) and names that are actually written with "ae"/"oe"/"ue" (Goethe)...
  - eru 4y ago
    Yes, but nonetheless that's the official rule for German.
  - beeforpork 4y ago
    There is nothing ambiguous about it, because it's the same pronunciation. It's a convention of how this particular name is spelled. But does German have ambiguities here? Yes, it does. In the instrument 'Oboe', the 'oe' is pronounced as two syllables: long 'o' plus schwa. It cannot be written with 'ö'. It should better be written 'Obohe' (my controversial proposal). And dialectally/regionally, 'oe' may be long 'o' instead of the 'ö' sound, like in the city of 'Soest', which could be written 'Sohst', but then people from that city would complain (about tradition, maybe).
    - nominusllc 4y ago
      there is no schwa in oboe, its oh-bow not oh-bow-uh ō′bō <-- see? From the American Heritage Dictionary 5th-ed. A schwa is the upside down 'e' which is not present.

AzzieElbab 4y ago

I keep wondering what will be written about out current state on medicine a couple of centuries later

avgDev 4y ago
Probably in a negative light. Many doctors now believe if they cannot test for something, it doesn't exist. This has been changing with long covid. Western medicine is in a weird place. It is based on science but sometimes it takes a very long time for science and information to trickle down to doctors....like decades. Then, there are pharma reps who sway doctors with new treatments, with questionable research.
- AzzieElbab 4y ago
  Looking at my original post, clearly modern medicine didn’t do much for my dyslexia:)

sriku 4y ago

I was amused that the article claimed that loss of eyesight would end an era of music when Beethoven's loss of hearing certainly didn't end his compositional ability.

ptha 4y ago
You're probably already aware, there is evidence that Beethoven was not completely deaf. According to a leading Beethoven expert, the composer still had hearing in his left ear until shortly before his death in 1827. “Not only was Beethoven not completely deaf at the premiere of his Ninth Symphony in May 1824, he could hear, although increasingly faintly, for at least two years afterwards, probably through the last premiere that he would supervise, his String Quartet in B-flat, Op 130, in March 1826,” Albrecht said. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/feb/01/beethoven-not-completely-deaf-says-musicologist https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/feb/01/beethoven-not-...
- sriku 4y ago
  Sure yeah. The first part of my comment isn't dependent on Beethoven's full loss of hearing though --- loss of eyesight ending an era of music still sounds a rather hilarious statement to me :)