Browsing all posts in "medicine".

Wanton Whores? Who Says?

Since time immemorial, it seems, women have been viewed as voracious sexual predators. It was taken as a given, since at least the time of Aristotle (who is said to have originated the idea but was probably just writing down the accepted wisdom of the time). Through Aristotle, it became known to the medieval Christian [...]

Is that Queen Victoria on your Medicine Bottle?

The 1880s were a great time to make a fortune in snake oil. The “patent medicine” business really took off at the end of the 19th century. Let’s face it–conventional medicine had not a whole lot to offer. Bleeding, mercurials, radical surgeries… Can you blame folks for checking out the competition? This is the age [...]

Paging Dr. Google…

I was so duped. When I was in training, they convinced me that medicine was hard. That it took years of practice to be able to settle on a diagnosis from a presenting list of signs and symptoms. That the only way to get it right was to spend ages learning everything there was to [...]

What’s the Opposite of Seeing the Virgin in a Cheese Sandwich?

That would be, I would guess, seeing a cheese sandwich in a picture of the Virgin Mary. While we might wonder about the psychology, and perhaps the timing of the last meal, of the viewer so inclined, we would probably shrug and say, “SO?” Because cheese sandwiches just aren’t as exciting as godheads. Just sayin’. [...]

You Say Hysteria, I Say…???

Hysteria is a very complex topic. It has been examined exhaustively by historians of medicine, social historians, feminist historians, feminists, sociologists, neurologists, psychiatrists, neuropsychiatrists… Here’s the thing–not any of them agree on what hysteria actually was. Or is. Or might have been. Or probably wasn’t. They do agree on one thing–Hippocrates was wrong. Hippocratic tradition [...]

Sacerdotal Medicine

While we make fun of premodern medicine, regularly and promiscuously (and are about to start making fun of early modern medicine, regularly and promiscuously), it is important to keep reminding ourselves that there is an end to the madness. Modern medicine has reduced our maternal mortality from 6 out of every 1000 women (the number [...]

Graverobbers R Us (but if we can’t find the right corpses…)

Medicine has a long (several thousand year) history of graverobbing. You see, for most of the history of medicine, examining actual bodies has been considered, well, sacrilege. And that didn’t even come from the monotheistic tradition (although the Torah made the rules about dealing with the dead very clear)–it dates all the way back as [...]

Madame Trota Tells it All

Quick recap: Europe, stuck in the dark ages, has only a few second hand medical texts from the good old days of Rome. Mostly Hippocratic “common knowledge” rules the day; Soranus, that great obstetrician of antiquity, has been largely forgotten; Galen has disappeared into the Byzantine Empire. Sudden contact with the Arab world during the [...]

Medicine Goes Dark

This is supposed to be a post about the obstetrics of the dark ages. But–nothing happened in European medicine for about 600 years. Nothing. Nada. I’ve been through at least ten histories of obstetrics, and there’s just a sort of blank space. Some of the works of the ancient period did survive–locked away in monasteries [...]

And Along Came Constantine…

In order to understand what happened to medicine for the next 1500 years, a little understanding of Roman politics is in order. Rome, by the third century, was HUGE. It had extended to Britain in the north, Africa in the south, eastward as far as parts of Armenia. If there hadn’t been a big ocean [...]