The question in the OP is closely related to a thought that nags at me every time I watch a period film set in, like, Shakespearean times, or some other era prior to modern medicine, where the actors on screen are clean and healthy due to the benefits of today’s hygiene: The unpleasant reality, I assume, is that a lot of these people would be walking around with pinkeye or some other super-contagious infection that is now easily treated.
All the doctors knew it didn’t work, but they kept doing it because they were in the deep pockets of Big Leech.
And yet, here we are in 2022 with all the benefits of modern medicine and millions of people are opting for things like Ivermectin as a treatment for COVID and that includes doctors prescribing it for that purpose.
I laughed for the first time in four days over that, so thank you. I’m just imagining the Big Leech lobby with big cigars, fast boats and piles of cocaine and hookers buying off politicians and doctors.
Firstly, not many doctors to the general public were educated. The typical doctor to the illiterate masses probably shared their literacy, and also pulled teeth and cut hair. There was not a lot of valid source material either. The idea that the heart’s job was to pump blood was a relatively new concept.
So again, challenging orthodoxy was rare and likely to drive away business unless you were prominent in the field. “What do you mean using leeches won’t work. If that’s the case, why is everyone else doing it?”
The prominent doctors with their own theories were just as likely to have ideas that were rectally sourced. Even as late as the early 1900’s, people like Freud were using rectally sourced just-so-stories to explain psychology instead of actual testable scientific hypotheses. (Worse than that - Freud is accused of concocting his theories while deliberately ignoring obvious childhood sexual abuse to avoid tanking his career by accusing prominent Viennese society of abuse) We have phrenology, acupuncture, chiropractry, aroma therapy, homeopathy, cupping, Christian Science and plenty of other equally valid alternatives to fixing the human body which share the same level of validity, without getting into swallowing sheep dip (invermectin) as a cure. The medical establishment drove Semmelweis to suicide by ridiculing his theory - demonstrate by data - that doctors were responsible for infections killing new mothers by not washing their hands.
Doctors despite holding life and death in their hands are no better than many other professions about admitting that they may have been wrong. Any nurse can tell you that.
He used simple observation and experiment to determine that doctors should wash their hands each time between seeing a new patient (in this case in maternity wards).
The doctors of the day thought this was an awful idea and an affront to them being “special” somehow and Semmelweis was ridiculed for it by most of the doctors of that time. Thousands of women likely died as a result of doctors willfully ignoring him.
Worse than that. Form what I’ve read, they were examining corpses to try to determine what was going on, and frequently went directly from an autopsy to the next birth. Deaths in the doctors’ ward was significantly higher than deaths in the nurses’ ward where the doctors were not often involved in births.
Being a doctor by then was a prestigious profession - and here Ignaz was suggesting that their hands were filthy, as if they were common lower class labourers. it was insulting - he was obviously wrong; they wiped their hands off after handling diseased corpses. Suggesting they were so filthy that they needed to use strong chlorine soap was a gross insult. Nobody does that. Besides, at the time there was no explanation why this would work.
When he instituted that policy for a while for his ward apparently deaths dropped significantly, but that “must have been coincidence” and the other doctors drove him into an insane asylum and eventual death and went back to what they were doing.
This was in 1850, so not that long ago. It took Pasteur and germ theory 20 years later (also slow to be accepted) to explain why this theory worked.
In addition to what others have said: it probably worked if the patient had hemochromatosis.
They do now; at least in theory.
It’s one of those concepts which is obvious once one’s heard it, but which may not be obvious at all to someone who hasn’t encountered it.
Also, since figuring out what’s actually effective requires fairly large samples in both the treatment group and the control group, unless there are large populations available for the experiment it just isn’t going to work. If there are six people with the same symptoms, and you try treatment x on three of them and do nothing with the other three, and two of the first three recover but only one of the control group does, you haven’t actually learned anything useful. If bloodletting always killed people immediately, that of course would be noted – which is why it wasn’t done by opening arteries, but in a controllable fashion which allowed removing only amounts that weren’t expected to be hazardous. But to determine that over a large group of people more of those who had bloodletting died than of those who didn’t requires a large number of otherwise equivalent people in both groups.
Plus which, fussing over people – doing something – comes under the placebo effect. And the placebo effect is real.
It wasn’t strep that got him, but my grandfather died from infection. He had somehow cut his foot and didn’t notice it until it was infected. He went to his doctor, who put him in the hospital, where he died on New Year’s Eve 1915.
Both my great uncles and my grandfather died from heart failure in their early 60’s, due to a weak heart from scarlet fever. They were born around 1900, so would have had the disease 1910 give or take.
There are several problems - first, the human body is remarkably variable. We can see this, for example with COVID where some have no symptoms, others eventually stop breathing. Some are fine, others have lingering organ and even brain damage.
Back in the day, one doctor’s experiments would not include enough of a sample to compensate for this variability. Plus, how many people would consent to a treatment where “there’s a 50-50 chance we’ll actually be doing nothing for you” when these were life-and-death situations. (I guess there’s always the Tuskegee approach.)
The big institutions -universities or hospitals - that could actually arrange a decent sized trial probably were the last places to challenge orthodoxy in those days. Remember it’s been exactly 100 years since it was demonstrated that isolated insulin could actually save lives. That experiment was run by a doctor and a grad student in the corner of a university lab with little expectation they would prove anything. When it proved to be a major milestone in modern medicine, of course, it was nominated for the Nobel prize. The prize went to Dr. Banting, who came up with the idea, and… Dr. MacKenzie, who managed the lab and submitted the nomination. Best was not even considered for nomination by MacKenzie because mere grad students shouldn’t get Nobel prizes.
It was actually available without a prescription at one time, although in most places, it was sold from behind the pharmacy counter with a signature, and in very limited quantities.
IIRC, a teaspoonful of that dreadful-smelling stuff had 2 milligrams of morphine, which is basically a homeopathic dose when taken orally.
In 1924, one of President Coolidge’s sons, Calvin Jr., developed a blister that became infected. He was dead in a week. Calvin Coolidge Jr.'s Death - Shapell
My daughter had scarlet fever and was fine 24 hours after starting antibiotics. However, if untreated it can cause heart valve damage, and as mentioned, even death.
Even in modern times not everybody gets treated for even simple things.
