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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?

by reidjs 4y ago

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

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?

by 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