Now, it may prove to be the case that you can use a medieval recipe of “a bit of garlic, some onion or leek, copper, wine and oxgall” to kill methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). And it may be true that “in 200 years, people will judge us” negatively for our ridiculous and barbaric medical practices. The lesson here, however, isn’t that we should get rid of the National Institute of Health (NIH) and begin consulting 10th Century “Leechbooks.” The lesson is that human beings do a remarkable job of figuring out solutions to problems with whatever tools are available to them. Every generation has its MacGyvers.
Hugh Capet, Eric the Red, and Basil II had to worry about getting infections, just like we do today. And if they had some “doctor” give them cow’s bile to drink and it saved their lives, that was all that mattered. Yet, we’d sensibly run in the other direction if that same “doctor” tried to treat us for strep throat or tonsillitis.
In 200 years, we’re going to be judged harshly, but there will be things we figured out that are still useful in a pinch. Most of those things will have been figured out using the Scientific Method, but some of them may have been figured out by cranks using the old brute-force trial and error methods of the Dark Ages.
What I don’t think is that there will be anything worth anything that was created or discovered by the Conservative Movement.
But I could be wrong. Maybe sometime in 2215, a team of medical researchers will find an important cure in one of our own Leechbooks.
That “cure” is WAY oversold. The claim was that it killed 90% of the pathogenic bacteria. Certainly useful, but no match for antibiotics. I’m also going to speculate that the benefit is from the bile salts, which help dissolve fats and are possibly interfering with the bacterial membranes.
The discovery indicates that people of the past knew something more than we’d thought so that part is certainly interesting.
Keep on sucking up them poisons, boys and girls. They good fer ya!!! Just ask Big Pharma.
As a close friend said to me yesterday while talking about Dr. Big Brother, Big Pharma and the Insurance Holding Companies, “Them vampires ain’t gonna get me!!!”
I concur.
On extensive personal experience.
Bet on it.
AG
By 2215, conservatives will still claim that the best medicine is the same one they’ve been recommending for a thousand years. Prayer. And by then researchers will have squandered another 200 years in trying and failing to prove that prayer works.
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Republicans will still be around, like the ubiquitous cockroach. They may do damage to themselves, but the greater destruction comes to the rest of society.
Future generations can learn from them not for their accomplishments, but rather as examples of self-interest, greed, intolerance, and bigotry. Would that we could find a cure for that!
This has been going on for a long time – aspirin comes from willow bark; quinine from cinchona bark; digitalis from foxglove; etc. etc. There WERE efficacious remedies that primitive cultures discovered – probably by accident – that were incorporated into historical medicine at some point in time. BUT, along with that, were A LOT of nonsensical, dangerous, poisonous remedies – thousands of them if you look at every culture – that killed more patients than they cured, for the simple reason that science wasn’t used to research them. “Hepatica” was recommended for liver disease because the leaves were supposedly liver-shaped; mercury was an ingredient in a LOT of 18th-19th century remedies – it kills patients almost as fast as it kills bacteria; manure/mud was plastered on wounds (!!!). When you take the “leechbook” as a whole, one remedy that works doesn’t give you a real good percentage. I’d say OUR leechbook may have some doozys in it, but I’d take our percentage over theirs.
I doubt if the ancients found their remedies through accident or trial/error. If so, there would exist a vast written record from ancient China and Egypt, for instance, recording such things. Yet, to my knowledge, their medical records only show the final prescriptive stage.
Mud and animal waste (or certain animals and mud from certain places) does seem to have antibiotic properties in fact. If I didn’t have any raw honey handy, I’d probably try the other approach in a pinch.
Our modern medicine could benefit from continuing to investigate some of these ancient remedies — minus the parts involving spells and incantations.
One of the most fascinating ancient remedies I’ve read about: ancient Egyptians about to undertake a long caravan journey would chew a local root before setting out. Purpose: to give their skin extra pigmentation. Only late in the 20th C did scientist discover the root had a chemical important in skin protection.
Hard to imagine this sunscreen approach was arrived at either by accident or trial/error.