A doctor who treated Bach and Handel with disastrous results

A doctor who treated Bach and Handel with disastrous results
tedgioia.substack.com

The author also did a great podcast with Tyler Cowen.

My favorite example is John Bradmore, who saved the life of King Henry V after he was shot in the fucking head with an arrow. Not only was John Bradmore a surgeon, he was also something of metalworker (and in fact, was arrested for making counterfeit coins; he had to be pulled out of jail to save the king's life). He used that skill to design a bespoke tool to pull the arrowhead out of the king's head, creating an antibacterial environment with honey and disinfecting the wound with alcohol (though this was before germ theory). Henry V would later go on to rule for 19 more years (he would die for seemingly unrelated reasons, heatstroke). By the way, this was in 1403.

There's also a problem with your criticism in the sense that it implies that doctors were blindly confident, and not for a particularly good reason. While obviously certain incorrect beliefs persisted for quite some time in history, it's from within medicine and from other doctors that these views were more often than not corrected and updated. Obviously, Galen believed incorrectly that the human heart has sinuses from which blood flowed across and was filtered, but to his defense he was not allowed by the state to perform human dissections. If anything, the neo-Galenists were to blame (as Andreas Versalius so often harshly criticized, to the detriment of his Latin grammar, funnily enough). But it's only through the work of people like Ibn al-Nafis, Vesalius, and William Harvey (the latter two's frustration with Galen comes across pretty clearly in their writing) that we have the perspective to say that beliefs like Galen's were wildly off the mark. What I mean to say is, that it's very easy to say that those early doctors were far too confident in their pseudo-scientific theories, yet that's the nature of scientific knowledge and the epistemology of medicine; we know better only because of social changes, technological improvements, and/or particularly clever insights.

> Most historians and medical experts now believe that Garfield probably would have survived his wound had the doctors been more capable.[66][67] However, most American doctors of the day did not believe in anti-sepsis measures or the need for cleanliness to prevent infection.[68] Several inserted their unwashed fingers into the wound to probe for the bullet, and one doctor punctured Garfield's liver in doing so. Also, Bliss had supplanted Garfield's physician Jedediah Hyde Baxter. Bliss and the other doctors who attended Garfield had guessed wrong about the path of the bullet in his body; they had probed rightward into his back instead of leftward, missing the location of the bullet but creating a new channel which filled with pus. The autopsy discovered this error and revealed pneumonia in both lungs and a body that was filled with pus due to uncontrolled sepsis.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_James_A._Garf...