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> We're barely a century removed from phrenology being an accepted criminal forensic tool. This, specifically, is a bad argument. Medicine is barely a century
by samatman 2y ago
> We're barely a century removed from phrenology being an accepted criminal forensic tool.
This, specifically, is a bad argument.
Medicine is barely a century removed from using mercury salts to treat syphilis, but as it stands, can completely cure it with modern treatments, the rise of drug-resistant strains notwithstanding.
If modern psychopathology is still largely prescientific, which one can make a strong case for, this is because of psychopathology now, not psychopathology a century ago.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago> Medicine is barely a century removed from using mercury salts to treat syphilis A very good point, worth reminding ourselves regularly in general[0]: almost everything around you and me, everything that our lives depend on, or that helps us day-to-day, almost everything we see or interact with that isn't wild nature - all that has been made possible in the past ~200 years. Most of that in less than 100. Science as we understand it today, is less than 200 years old. Medicine stopped being voodoo less than a century ago. Petroleum chemistry and materials engineering have defined most of how modernity looks in general; like every other field of endeavor, they really kicked into gear ~100 years ago. Circling back to GP's statement: >> We're barely a century removed from phrenology being an accepted criminal forensic tool. That's because we're barely a century removed from being a proper technological civilization - one that follows knowledge in a systematic fashion, instead of folklore in a haphazard way. -- [0] - Especially when playing with notions that current age is no different than all the ages before. It really is.