This is a bit unfair, all doctors were fucking terrible before the late 19th century, and lowered the lifespan of everyone they touched. They also seemed to prescribe mercury for everything. The only rational use for a doctor back then was if you needed emergency surgery because you were going to die very soon. It was a situation that they could only make better. The problem, I guess, is that the confidence and autho…
I’ve heard this repeatedly, is there any proof doctors used to be useless? Why didn’t they work other jobs? Were they simply con artists?
That's a book review of a readable book that makes the case quite compellingly.
> I recently read George Bernard Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma and experienced an unexpected sense of insult on behalf of my profession. In this celebrated play, Shaw serially indicts various kinds of late 19th century doctor—the hypocrite, the self publicist, and (most dangerous of all) the blinkered zealot. While I admired the plot construction, I suspected that Shaw had created such character extremes for comic effect. However, having read David Wootton's Bad Medicine, I am now no longer insulted and, on behalf of my profession, feel somewhat grateful to Shaw for his restraint. For, as Wootton painstakingly argues in this short but undoubtedly explosive new book, the history of medicine has been nothing less than a failure and doctors have been the culprits.