Dawn

To recap:

The Middle Ages, enlightened as they were compared to the Dark Ages, really didn’t have much on ancient Rome or Greece. Learned medicine was based on Galen and Hippocrates, who could do no wrong and knew all. Plebeian medicine was in the hands of the midwives, those folk heroes of the day who often faced the Inquisition and death, and whose medical care was based on lore and superstition. The men who took over their functions, however, really didn’t do any better than they did.

And then, something happened. It didn’t happen right away, or even quickly, but it did happen. Dawn arrived.

Historians call it “the Enlightenment.”

In order to understand it, we are forced to consider three individuals who really didn’t have much to do with women. In the case of one, absolutely nothing to do with women. None are generally mentioned in any history of obstetrics and gynecology, but all three were absolutely instrumental in changing the world, making way for the modern science of medicine. Without them, we’d still be stuck treating menstrual disorders with leeches.

These three men were Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke.

Bacon was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth and King James. He was a lawyer, but he was also a “natural philosopher” (There are rumors, BTW, that he was really QE’s illegitimate son by Dudley). Bacon railed against the lack of progress that epitomized enslavery to the past work of Aristotle and Plato. He was convinced that there was simply no POINT to knowledge if it didn’t move the human condition forward, and it hadn’t, really, for over 1000 years. Soo he proposed a totally new form of study, involving (GASP) evidence collection and evaluation by inductive reasoning.

He was roundly ignored by the powers that be, especially the universities. Galileo was, at around the same time, inventing  the telescope and looking at stars and planets–and he was laughed at, too, because there was really no reason to look at stuff, when Aristotle had laid it all out nicely and neatly. Experimental method? He must be mad.

Isaac Newton used this basic idea as his springboard when he observed fruit dropping on his farm during a plague break. He spent a little time inventing the math to explain it, and wound up describing the entire natural world with NUMBERS, something that up to this point had never even been conceived. Newton’s fame and brilliance spread like a beacon across Europe, emboldening the new class of “scientists” (a moniker that was generally hated, at the time, by the guys doing the science) to actually put Bacon’s radical ideas into use.

The finishing nail in the medieval Aristotelian program was hammered by John Locke. Yes, that John Locke, the guy whose philosophy pervaded the American Revolution. He was actually trained as a physician, and had a fairly decent reputation as a doc in England.

Locke argued that all knowledge is based on experience–one perforce had to examine stuff to know what the hell he was talking about. You couldn’t just look it up in an old textbook. You had to get your hands dirty. You had to have facts.

These three men plummeted Europe out of the Middle Ages, kicking and screaming (especially the Church. They were none too happy about the idea that empiricism trumps revelation. You can understand why). While there was not a gynecologist in the group, they are directly and largely responsible for the vanishingly low obstetric mortality rate in the modern era. Without them, we’d still be bleeding women for just about everything, and hunting for that wandering uterus. Because that’s what the Greeks would have done.

[When I say these guys didn't have much to do with women, I mean it.  While Bacon married (for money), he is rumored to have been gay. Newton had an extra staircase built so he would never even accidentally run into a maid. Locke never married, either.]

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