Galen, Darwin, and P.T. Barnum

My friends would tell you that the Minor Heretic is an easygoing guy. Rarely does anything make me pound my fist on the table and utter a sharp Anglo Saxon verb. Something I saw in the paper did just that the other day.

First, I should lay some historical groundwork. The Greeks, around 400 BCE, adopted a view of human health based on the theory of four humors, which in turn was based on the four elements of ancient physics. The elements were earth, air, fire, and water, and the humors were blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. By this theory, disease was caused by an imbalance in these humors. An attempt at restoring this balance constituted medicine as it was known, and consisted of bleeding, purging, or sweating the patient, until death or recovery.

A Roman of Greek extraction named Galen (b. 129 CE, d. ~217) popularized this method in his writings. His work was preserved and disseminated by scholars of the Byzantine Empire, and physicians merrily bled and purged according to his system, filling graves till the mid-19^th century. Like a gambler attributing his occasional wins to the efficacy of his lucky rabbit’s foot, a fifth or tenth or seventeenth century physician thought that Galen had shown the one path to human health.

Of course, it was all a crock. Patients of antiquity survived despite the ignorant cruelties of their doctors. It’s a wonder anyone did. Some unfortunate medieval burgher already struggling with influenza, malaria, or cholera would be fed emetics or laxatives, burned with heated metal cups, or have a vein cut and a pint or two drained off.

The practice didn’t let up until the beginnings of modern medicine appeared in the mid 19^th century.

Imagine my dismay when I came across a calendar listing in a local paper advertising a workshop in “Traditional Bleeding and Cupping, Module III” Some quack by the name of Julia Graves has the temerity to charge money for instruction in self mutilation and semi-suicide. Just to add to the hair-tearing aggravation of it, she tagged it with “Module III,” as if it were part of a legitimate course of medical study. The kitchen table in the Minor Heretic household received a minute of serious abuse.

I am trying to imagine who actually signed up for this. I am assuming that P.T. Barnum was correct, that there really is a sucker born every minute, and that some gullible wretches showed up, forked over real money, and offered up their veins to the knife.

I should note that the practice of cupping often involves soaking a small piece of cloth in flammable liquid, placing the cloth in a metal or glass cup, igniting it, and then placing the cup against the victim’s skin. The flaming cloth is thereby doused and the resulting vacuum sucks out a bump of skin. In Galenic theory this extracts some humor or another. In reality it just creates circular burns.

It staggers me that people living in 21^st century America, whatever their religious or political beliefs, could be so ignorant of the basic-below-basic foundations of human biology. We learned things in junior high school that blew this out of the water. Junior high? Hell, elementary school. And yet there are dimwits out there who will consider pre-medieval torture a plausible alternative to medical treatment.

I was talking (ok, ranting) about this with my neighbor, and he suggested that there is a knowledge elite in this country. Information about the physical world is all around us for the taking, essentially free. Only a small percentage of us are paying attention to it, absorbing it, processing it, and acting on it. Many people are just skating along on the minimum information necessary to do their jobs and get through the rituals of daily life.

When confronted with something outside their normal range of experience, these people have no tools for analyzing the truth or falsehood of claims. Armed only with emotion (an instinctive distrust of profit driven corporate medicine?) they think, “’Traditional’ feels good, and ‘Module III’ sounds official,” and expose their throats to the butcher.

And yet, a trip to the emergency room will save them. Natural selection has been blunted by the Trauma Center. Modern medicine, for all its faults, is at its best when confronting the results of abject human stupidity. Reckless drivers, YouTube stunt artists, careless gun owners, and neo-medieval self-medicators will mostly get reassembled and sent off to breed. Critical thinking and impulse control are both made irrelevant by QuickClot bandages, fine suturing, and a ready supply of blood plasma.

I am hoping that the VT Department of Health and/or the Attorney General’s office catch up with Ms. Graves and shut her down. She certainly doesn’t have to worry about a skeptical and informed populace.

For those of you who want further information on medieval medicine, I refer you to the third season of Saturday Night live and a performance by Steve Martin.

Comments

[King of Paine]

Even as I began reading your post, my mind immediately leapt to one of my favorite SNL skits, "Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber." Only natural and fitting that you should close with the reference. Brilliant piece and I share your despair/anger when contemplating the desperate gullibility of some people. These weird times are causing some, as Hunter S. Thompson might say, to "turn pro."