We’ve had father/son pairs in prison at the same time before. And I’ve a handful of pregnant female patients. They’re on buprenorphine for the duration of their pregnancy, and that takes special licensing which only I have in our system.
In addition I get called on juvenile patients at times, from our juvenile system.
But I must admit I don’t do a lot of well child checks or birth control appointments anymore. I miss the kids, they were fun. The parents were often a PITA though.
Yeah, draining abscesses goes way back. But doing it with emphasis on antisepsis is what would improve my overall patient outcomes.
And I don’t see myself making chloramphenicol or mercurochrome or gentian violet or penicillin based on what knowledge I carry in my head. Though if supplied with gentian root I suppose I could experiment a little.
Basically the biggest benefits I’d bring to bear would involve better hygiene and water and sewer arrangements, and not harming people with ineffective treatments.
That’s a pretty good summary. But to be clear I wasn’t talking about a time travelling modern doctor. But an actual pre-modern doctor with the technology and knowledge available to them at the time.
Well penicillin you’d kind of be in luck for, it wasnt exactly totally unknown, you just might wanna isolate it and bottle in in pink liquid form instead of rotten bread form.
Aspirin your good, even though it may have a barky woody taste
Well, if said Doctor could somehow collect the various known things from other areas
he might be in pretty good shape for his time, long as no one burns him for being a witch, heretic, unbeliever or what not to what ever deity is in charge.
Said doctor is going to need some world traveling ability though.
The compound in willow bark is salicylic acid. Aspirin is acetylsalicylic acid, a closely-related compound derived from it. Both have similar benefits, but the side effects from salicylic acid are much worse, especially on the digestive system. And it’s not easy to process salicylic acid into acetylsalicylic acid.
Likewise, it’s easy to get bread mold, but that does you very little good. One particular strain of one particular species of bread mold produces a very safe and effective antibiotic. Other strains or species of mold produce other substances, some of them more or less similar to that antibiotic. Some of those substances aren’t safe to humans, some aren’t very effective versus bacteria, and some are neither. And I don’t think it’s even known how common the “good” strain is in the wild: It’s very common now due to us going to great lengths to cultivate it, because it’s so useful to us, but we don’t know exactly how lucky Fleming was to have that particular strain growing in his petri dish.
Don’t read too much into the fact that premodern doctors used moldy bread in poultices, by the way. They did, but then, they used just about everything imaginable in poultices, including various sorts of dung. It’s conceivable that some few patients in history might have gotten lucky and ended up with the good strain of penicillium in their moldy-bread poultice, but overall, people would have been much better off with poultices of just boiled cotton cloth with no mold (or honey or dung or whatever) at all.
Would that help too much? I know there were times that one region was ahead of others (I would rather be treated by a Arab doctor than his European counter-part during the dark ages). But other than a few things where knowledge was more advanced (or possibly a general tendency to treat holistically rather than go poking around with dirty fingers) would it have made it much difference? The big things that made a difference (germ theory, antiseptics, anesthetics and antibiotics) were not AFAIK invented anywhere prior to the Europe in the modern age.
Figuring how to do that was one of the biggest discoveries in the history of chemistry: protected reactions. If you try to do it the obvious way it doesn’t work, the acetyl group sticks in the wrong place. You have to protect this wrong site, then add the acetyl and then deprotect. This has now become routine, allowing many synthesis which would be impossible by the apparent direct routes.
The secret to old timey medical practice would be specialization. Dr kayaker, specializing in the treatment of self limiting diseases and conditions. By appointment only. No billing.
Folks, you certainly CAN do surgery without anesthesia. I don’t know where you get this notion that no one removed anything from a human body before anesthesia. Lots of surgeons did lots of surgery before anesthesia.
It sucked if you were the patient, of course, and there would be several people holding you down so you did thrash too much, and surgeons got used to ignoring the screaming and got the job done as quickly as possible. But surgery did occur back in the old days. It helped often enough that desperate people continued to undergo it when necessary.
Lister used carbolic acid in dressings and the like, so it was at least used topically. Of course, it also tended to damage healing tissues as well as killing bacteria but it still beat devastating infections and sepsis.
griffen1977, the advantage to travel would not be in gathering knowledge from around the world (a time-traveling doctor would already have more of that than the entire world combined), but rather gathering pharmaceuticals. There are some plants which have useful medicinal properties in their natural form, and others which can be easily processed into useful forms (as well as some that are processed only with difficulty, but those aren’t relevant here). But the problem is that those useful plants grow in many different places.
The story of the royal fistula seems relevant. To summarize: King Louis XIV (1638-1715) suffered from an anal fistula. Charles-François Felix, a barber-surgeon, was tasked to perform an operation. He asked for 6 months to prepare, during which time he experimented on 75 prisoners and peasants (many of whom didn’t survive), then successfully treated the King. “The king was sitting up in bed within a month and was back on his horse within three months.”
That’s actually the example that prompted the OP. Actually it was a discussed on QI and how following the operation having anal fistula was very de rigueur among the french aristocracy!
There obviously some cases where even fairly invasive surgery could be completed successfully (though presumably the king’s survival was probably the result of good luck and a good immune system.)
For all the horror involved, and the slim chances of survival, amputation of gangrenous limbs probably counts as “effective treatment”. As your slim chances during and after amputation, were still better than your chances with untreated gangrene.
[Off Topic]Being familiar with the story, when I skimmed that link in the OP what leapt out to me personally was its claim that the instruments used are on display at Versailles. No, they’re not - or at least they weren’t when I saw them in the collections of the Musée d’Histoire de la Médecine on the Left Bank, about a decade ago. Googling to confirm led me to this post. Really does look as if one of these two pages is somewhat plagiarising the other. At least the second does get the current location of the instruments correct.
(Other links confirm they’re still in the Paris museum, rather than Versailles.)[/Off Topic]
