Without sources, that’s pretty much all pure speculation. The idea that lobotomies/trepanation were originally used for constructive applications seems especially far-fetched.
You’re confusing lobotomy and trepanation. The latter is where a hole is cut in the skull to relieve cranial pressure (from a head trauma, etc.) and prevent the swelling from killing the patient. Lobotomy, despite the desires of Hollywood makeup artists, didn’t involve a large incision, cutting out a chunk of the brain, etc. Instead, it involved the probably-creepier method of sticking an icepick-like instrument through the eye socket and swirling it around to scramble the frontal lobes like cooked eggs. Yeek.
I’ve always hated that song.
-
Everybody knew the world was round. They all laughed at Christopher Columbus because he claimed it was smaller than what everybody else knew it was. And he was wrong.
-
They all laughed with delight when Edison recorded sound, then showered him with accolades and called him The Wizard of Menlo Park. They didn’t laugh when he claimed to have perfected the light bulb and gas company stocks fell. Sure, he hadn’t quite done it yet, but everybody knew he would soon because he had already invented so much.
-
The only reason anybody (Langley) laughed at the Wright brothers is because they were so secretive to protect their patents that they would not demo it in public. Then there was the matter of the catapult and the suspicion (probably justified) that the Flyer could not take off under its own power and that the airplane had merely been thrown a few yards.
-
I have no recollection of anybody laughing at Marconi. The late 19th and early 20th centuries was the Golden Age of Woo, when any crackpot notion was carried in the newspapers and believed the world over. Believing in radio was easier than believing in canals on Mars, and everybody believed in them.
Einstein is supposed to have said something to the effect that attempting to control atomic energy
would be like “shooting for birds at night in a region where there a few birds.” That might have been
before discovery of the neutron, though.
Yes I’d like to see a cite on all this. Seems like retconning to me. From what little I know most of these woo “cures” were used on a whole bunch of conditions, and were totally useless if not positively detrimental for the vast majority of those conditions. Now we have found empirically that some treatments, that bear some resemblance to those woo “cures”, do actually work in some very specific cases. However, this seems to me to be more of case of “a stopped clock being accurate twice a day” than any indication whatever that the treatments ever had any benefit.
Take bloodletting. I don’t know a great deal about it but a quick read on wiki suggests than when it was fashionable, it was recommended for everything. If it was, as it happens, occasionally used on patients with an excess of iron, that’s not because it worked for such cases but rather because if you throw darts in every direction all the time, occasionally one will hit the bullseye.
There’s a big difference between a new idea that seems possible, but hasn’t yet been proven, and an old idea that has been repeatedly shown to have no validity.
Most beliefs in today’s woo category fall in the latter. Hahnemann’s theories about curing disease haven’t been shown to have the slightest validity in over 250 years. In contrast, the germ theory of disease was validated both in the lab and in practice in a much shorter time and evidence is accumulating yet today.
One of the halmarks of a pseudoscience is that evidence does not strengthen over time. For that matter, a corollary would be the longer that a theory exists without accumulating good evidence, the more likely that it is an invalid postulate in the first place.
Artemisinin, which is a bit of a wonder drug for malaria, has an interesting story. It was known as an anti-malarial as early as the 4th century. That knowledge was lost and likely written off as woo until the 1960s, when a Communist China military project just worked through traditional medicine texts testing everything on the off chance that something was useful.
Artemisinin turned out to be astonishingly effective, but that knowledge wasn’t widely publicized for years. Finally, in 1979, the findings were published and met with great skepticism. In the 70s and 80s, access to Artemisinin was tightly controlled, and Western scientists remained quite skeptical, especially as it was developed by the Chinese military. It wasn’t until much later that it was accepted as the key component of modern malaria treatment. Until resistance develops, it is basically a silver bullet and I can personally say it most likely saved my own life.
We have so much to learn from them.
Joe
Per this article the perception of the efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy, of which Freud’s psychotherapy was variant, was borderline woo(ish) in the minds of many researchers, but has recently improved substantially.
People laughed at the calming effects of the first, steam powered, female vibrator.
Chugga-Chugga WOO! WOO!
Perhaps a bit late to the party, but:
According to the story, Ignaz Semmeweiss got the idea from a dialog with a knacker. The use of bleaching powder - calcium hypochlorite - was apparently a well-known trick among knackers to get the smell of feces off their hands after work. Thus, to Semmelweiss, bleach powder seemed a very strong cleansing agent and it was natural to try it.
And chlorine is an even better disinfectant than alcohol. I guess you’d rather disinfect your toilet with bleach than with Everclear 
That’s because they’re invoking the Special Pleading fallacy, also known as the Shyness Effect.
This is the first I’ve read of “woo”, so this probably doesn’t fit within the definition, but would the bacterial theory of peptic ulcers count? (Pdf.) An easier, briefer note.
I’m not sure to what extent people ridiculed Dr. Kellogg’s claims, but I don’t think is then-radical ideas were popular at the time. Eating whole grains and vegetables, exercising, quitting drinking and smoking! The very idea! To be fair, he also had some pretty crackpot notions about the health-giving properties of electricity, but still.
I actually raised this question with Dr. Steven Novella, who gave a talk at The Amazing Meeting 10 about how to identify woo practioners. He stated that someone who claims something completely different than the current best knowledge is often woo. It’s what happens AFTER the claim that matters. Unusual claims should be tested, and if they show positive results, continue testing them until we understand them.
So the H. Pylori proposal was (my words) “candidate woo” at the time because it was a radical proposal going against all experience up to that time. Testing, however, showed it to have promise, and over time results then became stronger and stronger that the hypothesis was actually true.
J.
What about electric shock therapy? It was discredit, but has made a comeback as a treatment for depression.
Agree - and I’d add the qualifier that the rejected therapy has to be taken up by “alternative” practitioners who proclaim its virtue during the years before it is ultimately validated. By those standards it is difficult to come up with any validated woo.
The OP’s question is sort of like the one about whether any conspiracy theories were true (obviously there have been many conspiracies, but virtually none where a brave band of amateur conspiracy-fighters exposed them over official resistance).
Semmelweis’s handwashing and the discovery of H. pylori are cited ad nauseaum by alt med enthusiasts as evidence that their woo will one day be widely accepted. I am unaware of any woo underground that was practicing hand-washing/sterile technique before Semmelweis. And it’s an altie fantasy that the H. pylori theory was laughed at/suppressed by the Evil Pharma Establishment.
“One might expect that if scientific medicine had dogmatically rejected Warren and Marshall’s hypothesis, there would be scant references to their reports for the several years after the initial publications. The opposite is the case: the biomedical world was abuzz with Campylobacter pylori (subsequently known as Helicobacter pylori) from the start, as is demonstrated…by the number of papers listed on PubMed, the online database of the National Library of Medicine, as a function of the calendar year throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. The rate of increase after 1983 is nearly exponential…
Within a couple of years of the original report, numerous groups searched for, and most found, the same organism. Bacteriologists were giddy over the discovery of a new species. By 1987—virtually overnight, on the timescale of medical science—reports from all over the world, including Africa, the Soviet Union, China, Peru, and elsewhere, had confirmed the finding of this bacterium in association with gastritis and, to a lesser extent, ulcers. Simpler and less invasive diagnostic methods were devised (Graham et al. 1987; Evans et al. 1989). The possibility of pyloric campylobacter being the cause of gastritis or ulcers was exciting and vigorously discussed, even as it was acknowledged by all, including Marshall and Warren, to require more evidence…
The New England Journal of Medicine, the most widely read medical journal in the world, offered this editorial: “Further unfolding of the details [of the possible etiologic role of C. pylori in peptic ulcer disease] will be enhanced by the development of an animal model, by epidemiologic studies, and by identification of the source and the virulence properties of specific serotypes of C. pylori. The prospects are exciting, intriguing, and promising” (Hornick 1987).”
By the way, artemisinin is not a “silver bullet” for malaria. It is a useful drug, but one that malarial parasites are unfortunately developing resistance to. There are plenty of plant-based drugs that have entered general medical practice, once their value was discovered/confirmed by adequate testing.
As they say–you know what you call alternative medicine that works? Medicine.
That might be stretching it a bit to call it “candidate woo.” What was proposed was not an unknown, undetectable force. Sure, it went contrary to established thinking about ulcers, but we knew bacteria existed and caused similar symptoms. What had to be determined did not require uprooting of all medical science to be true, and indeed, the evidence strengthened as tests progressed.
As I understand it, Kellog’s purpose in this was not general good health, but to cool sexual appetites. As such his theories remain woo.
Semmelweis’s theories weren’t woo. He was just ignored and his ideas went untested. Real woo is something like aromatherapy that lots of people try and some claim it works, but any effect is has is placebo. What sometimes happens (as with leeches) is that some treatment is widespread, discarded as woo (or worse, dangerous) and then turns out to actually be useful but only in a very limited context.
The poster child for this might be willow bark which contains aspirin.