By MN Gordon
Bleeding the Patient to Health
There’s something alluring about cure-alls and quick fixes. Who doesn’t want a magic panacea to make every illness or discomfort disappear? Such a yearning once compelled the best and the brightest minds to believe the impossible for over two thousand years.
Instantaneous relief! No matter what your affliction is, snake oil cures them all. [PT]
For example, from antiquity until the late-19th century, bloodletting was used to treat nearly every disease. Reputable medical references recommended bloodletting as a cure for acne, asthma, cancer, epilepsy, gout, indigestion, insanity, leprosy, pneumonia, scurvy, tuberculosis, and everything in between. Bloodletting was even used to treat hemorrhaging.
The practice was simple enough. A surgeon, often a barber, would open a vein and drain blood from the patient. Somehow, this was supposed to cure them of disease.
The fundamental idea was that a sick person could be bled to health. Induced fainting, via bloodletting, was even considered beneficial. However, the results were often fatal.
On December 13, 1799, George Washington returned from a cold-winters horseback ride across his estate with a raspy throat. So, he requested bloodletting to make his sore throat better. Over a ten-hour period, roughly 126 ounces of blood was drained from his system.
The next day Washington’s treatment culminated in perfect success. Because of the bloodletting, Washington never suffered from a sore throat again. He had received a permanent cure. Namely, he croaked.
Wouldn’t a tablespoon or two of honey and lemon have been a better solution to the sore throat problem? Sure, it would have been less effective. But it would have been a great deal less terminal as well.
George Washington: so-so land speculator, successful revolutionary & general, founding father, first president of the US, and reportedly no friend of foreign entanglements. Here seen in those all too brief final hours, enjoying a sore throat for the very last time, orbited by family and assorted quacks. We don’t know who’s who in this picture, but this is obviously a room brimming over with decidedly fatal good intentions. There is a picture of Lincoln’s deathbed (which shows his prostrate body crammed into a tiny room with his wife and 15 politicians and generals, who are trying their best to look solemn and grimly resolved to carry on) that gives off similarly morbid vibes. There is a major difference though: almost no-one is contemplating Lincoln with the thoughtful, calculating looks Washington is at the receiving end of here. Lincoln was probably judged a hopeless case and had been crossed off everybody’s Rolodex already (a hole in the head is rarely conducive to one’s continued life and career). By contrast, Washington still offered the quacks a chance to speed up the healing process by devising ingenious ways of killing him. Admittedly, the cure really is hard to beat in terms of its permanence. It is an apodictic certainty that Washington never complained about a sore throat again. [PT]
Curing a Debt Problem with Credit
Certainly, repeated observation of the practice …read more
Source:: Acting Man
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