They couldn’t determine that. Some people got better, some didn’t. Just as with any illness. If everyone who was bled died, then the doctor might get a clue. But some didn’t so they stuck with what they had always done.
Makes perfect sense. That’s why this board is such a great place.
My dad had it in the 1930’s, it left him deaf in one ear. It killed his 5 year old sister.
Evidence based medicine is a lot newer than you might imagine, and is still fighting for acceptance in a lot of areas. Lots of medicine was based on overarching theories of physiology and disease. Humors ruled the roost for centuries. Doctors were taught about balancing humors, and so blood letting was not just some arbitrary idea, but one that came with a well developed theory. Just one that had no basis in fact. But since there were no better theories, and centuries of dogma going back to wisdom of the ancients, respected learned teachers taught the next generation how to let blood.
There is still a lot of medicine that is based upon taking knowledge of physiology and the medical problem and projecting a treatment. Despite the extraordinary complexity of of both. Physicians today remain guilty of hammer/nail thinking. Surgery is still performed which has no statistically significant improvement in outcomes because it seems to be a good idea. Drugs are prescribed similarly. Vested interests in the drug trade and patient’s expectations of treatment probably account for a huge amount of overprescribing. It takes lots of careful statistical work to tease out the value, and even now it is often not done.
My mother said that it was very dangerous to leave it untreated as that killed Jim Henson. This was after I told her I got it treated. *shrugs. 
even back then they differentiated between types of sore throats. Strep generally caused high fever, swollen tender lymph nodes, and purulence on the tonsils on the retropharynx. That was different from the sore throat of a common cold or diphtheria.
Mostly because the other shit they could have done as an alternative also didn’t work.
My dad once told me the “secret” of Chinese medicine: make the cure worse than the disease. My (Chinese) grandmother gave me some of the foulest testing medicine (I suspect snake bile) when I complained of an upset stomach. It worked perfectly - I didn’t complain about my stomach for the rest of our visit.
Maybe leeches work the same way.
I thought Jim Henson died of bacterial pneumonia. Did it start as strep throat?
If they were unlucky, it turned into scarlet fever. My grandmother had a little sister who died of scarlet fever around the time of the Spanish Flu epidemic.
Wikipedia says it was toxic shock from Group A Streptococcus pyogenes, which is the typical 'strep throat" bacteria.
It may have turned into dropsy (edema resulting from heart and/or kidney failure) or quinsy, which is an abscess of the peri-tonsillar region and still occurs occasionally nowadays.
Or, for that matter, herbal tea enemas, which in some circles were used for almost anything, because of the idea that they were at least, well, doing something.
Ever heard of people using coffee enemas for cancer treatment? That’s the Gerson treatment, which, when it was developed in the 1920s, worked about as well as any other cancer “therapy.”
Group A strep is also the causative organism of scarlet fever (as you probably know, but many Dopers wouldn’t) and in the early and mid 20th century, even before antibiotics were readily available, it was rapidly becoming a far less virulent organism, for reasons still unknown.
In 1940, when she was 6 years old, my mother got it, and was quarantined for 3 weeks. Only her mother and the doctor were allowed to see her, and everything she touched had to be either boiled, or destroyed by burning, and yes, they did have a big “QUARANTINE” sign nailed to the house.
Exactly. A lot of this sort of stuff came from the writing of ancient Romans and Greeks, or from the classic texts of the middle ages. If the mighty Roman empire that ruled the known world had determined that the humors ruled the body, who was some lowly physician to question that?
It was no different than what applied to other disciplines until scientists actually began to question and experiment - Astronomy( or Astrology), Physics, Chemistry - if the Greeks and Romans said so, it must be so. It was a struggle to prove the earth moved, the same physical laws moved the planets and objects on earth, that life did not spontaneously arise out of putrefaction, or any one of dozens of classical “known facts”. As someone pointed out, Plato asserted that women had less teeth than men without asking his wife to open wide and say “aaah”.
Eh, maybe Plato’s wife had fewer teeth than he had. I have fewer teeth than my husband. (I never grew wisdom teeth in my upper jaw.)
But the broader point, that no one bothered to check what the ancients said, is true, of course.
Henson appeared with Kermit on The Arsenio Hall Show on May 4, 1990. This would be his final television appearance. He disclosed to his publicist that he was tired and had a sore throat, but that he believed it would soon go away. On May 12, 1990, Henson traveled to Ahoskie, North Carolina, with his daughter Cheryl to visit his father and stepmother. They returned to their home in New York City the following day, and Henson cancelled a Muppet recording session that had been scheduled for May 14, 1990.[7] His estranged wife came to visit that night.[ citation needed ] Henson was having trouble breathing when he woke up at around 2:00 a.m. (EST) on May 15, 1990, and began coughing up blood. He suggested to his wife that he might be dying, but he did not want to take time off from his schedule to visit a hospital. Two hours later, Henson agreed to be taken by taxi to the emergency room at New York–Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. Shortly after admission, he stopped breathing and was rushed into the intensive care unit. X-ray images of his chest revealed multiple abscesses in both of his lungs as a result of a previous bacterial infection. Henson was placed on a ventilator but quickly deteriorated over the next several hours despite increasingly aggressive treatment with multiple antibiotics. Although the medicine killed off most of the infection, it had already weakened many of Henson’s organs,[42] and he died at 1:21 a.m. the following morning. He was 53.
Doctor David Gelmont announced that Henson had died from Streptococcus pneumoniae , an infection that causes bacterial pneumonia.[8] However, on May 29, 1990, Gelmont reclassified it as organ dysfunction resulting from streptococcal toxic shock syndrome caused by Streptococcus pyogenes .[4][5] Gelmont noted Henson might have been saved had he chosen to undergo antibiotic treatment even just a few hours sooner.[43] Medical expert Lawrence D. Altman also stated Henson’s death “may have shocked many Americans who believed that bacterial infections no longer could kill with such swiftness.”[4] Henson’s closest collaborator, Frank Oz believes that the stress of negotiating with Disney led to Henson’s death, stating in a 2021 interview that “The Disney deal is probably what killed Jim. It made him sick”.[44]
From Wikipedia ^1
I was a young kid when he died but I think it did shock the medical profession. It has stuck with my mother 30 years later.
And he does sound like me. “Ah, I’ve got of work to do. Just a little sore throat. I’ll tough it out.” But he serves as a tragic example not to try to be so tough.
I do now after having slept this afternoon and evening and finding this subject very interesting. I did not make the connection when the earlier poster mentioned Scarlet Fever. I remember doing genealogy and seeing that within a week Scarlet Fever killed a father and 6 of 10 children in the 1840s.
It is sad to think that so many people suffered tragedies when we take a simple pill, and although this is GQ, it is sad from post #2 that some people still cannot be provided these pills.
Sorry for the triple post, but maybe I am wrong, but I thought most educated people who dealt in processes, whether that be medicine or business looked at results against a control sample. Not just “Is this better than what anyone else in the business is doing?” but crucially also, “Is this better than leaving it alone?”
And I get that if I am a doctor in 1640, you are not interested in my new theories to use your wife on whom as a guinea pig. Mr. Dr., place those leeches as we know that medical science requires! and I would be shunned if I did nothing and she died.
But surely there were times and places where that wasn’t available and some smart people could see that not only did it not improve over nothing, it was far worse than nothing.
Control samples are harder to find than one might hope. In many areas there just isn’t time to do any sort of valid experiment or the funds.
The ethics of control groups is difficult and nuanced. Especially when there seems to be an apparent cause, effect and logic pointing to treatment. For drugs there is a lot of science demanded, mostly because there have been tragic mistakes made in the past. But nothing is perfect. The recent approval of Aduhalem is a good example.
The recent furore over statins underlines the tensions in the system. Healthcare is a moving target. There is not the luxury to wait for the answers. The clock is always ticking and deciding on an approach is always based on limited knowledge. The choices made and the outcomes should at least inform decisions in the future.
Furthermore, if you don’t try, you don’t know. Statistically valid results require that patients are implicitly part of a huge cohort of subjects. Everyone wants the best care possible for themselves, but that care comes from the experience of other patients. Whilst we might resist the idea that our personal care is part of that global experiment, the reality is that it is. Your bad outcome may in some small way help direct good outcomes for others in the future.