I keep wondering what will be written about out current state on medicine a couple of centuries later
A doctor who treated Bach and Handel with disastrous results
61–70 of 76 posts
Re: A doctor who treated Bach and Handel with disastrous results
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is nothing ambiguous about it, because it's the same pronunciation. It's a convention of how this particular name is spelled. But does German have ambiguities here? Yes, it does. In the instrument 'Oboe', the 'oe' is pronounced as two syllables: long 'o' plus schwa. It cannot be written with 'ö'. It should better be written 'Obohe' (my controversial proposal). And dialectally/regionally, 'oe' may be long 'o' in…
there is no schwa in oboe, its oh-bow not oh-bow-uh ō′bō <-- see? From the American Heritage Dictionary 5th-ed. A schwa is the upside down 'e' which is not present.
They were talking about the German word, not the English one.
Re: A doctor who treated Bach and Handel with disastrous results
#63This 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…
> and lowered the lifespan of everyone they touched
This really isn't true.
Re: A doctor who treated Bach and Handel with disastrous results
#64This 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?
The BBC did a series called Victorian Pharmacy[1] where they set out to operate a pharmacy from the era and try out the various "remedies" of the time. If you watch the series you'll quickly notice a common theme: there are very few victorian remedies the show could actually try today because it would be unethical. And some of the cures they could try seemed a lot like instruments of torture. Like the Malvern Water Cure, for example, which starts at ~38 minutes in this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXnVTMzSy3s
Re: A doctor who treated Bach and Handel with disastrous results
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So the knowledge of what to use to disinfect wounds already existed, but apparently wasn't undisputed until much later... Not sure he had the right theory, though? He might have used honey 'by accident'?
Even if the theory was probably still lacking, a solid empirical basis would still be infinitely preferable to none at all.
Yes, but I don't know whether he had a solid empirical basis?
Compare https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm a store about how the cure to scurvy was found and lost and found again.
Re: A doctor who treated Bach and Handel with disastrous results
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here is an image of the tool: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EyiqN6UXMAAZbrM?format=jpg&name=... I must admit it's pretty clever.
Not only that, but crucially (quote from Wikipedia): "Over a period of several days, John Bradmore, the royal physician, treated the wound with honey to act as an antiseptic, crafted a tool to screw into the embedded arrowhead (bodkin point) and thus extract it without doing further damage, and flushed the wound with alcohol." Despite the clever tool, if the wound had gotten infected, the then-prince would have proba…
There's certainly other examples of inventions preceding understanding. Pasteurization was invented many times, Louis Pasteur was the last inventor, and the only one who understood germ theory. Citrus rations to prevent scurvy predate the discovery of vitamins.
I want to say I've heard of wounds being treated with honey in translations of Greek myths, but I couldn't swear to that.
Re: A doctor who treated Bach and Handel with disastrous results
#67I was amused that the article claimed that loss of eyesight would end an era of music when Beethoven's loss of hearing certainly didn't end his compositional ability.
Re: A doctor who treated Bach and Handel with disastrous results
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I often hear the lament about "illegal to perform dissection!" But let's be honest. If you dissect a pig, you could have made all those discoveries about how the heart worked and what lungs were for and which organs connected to what. You didn't need a human subject.
How would you KNOW it worked the same as a human heart if you have never seen the insides of a human. This is pre-darwin so the common evolution of mammals is not yet understood.
I thought there were plenty of stories of doctors/curios people buying dead people.
Even Leonardo da Vinci
Re: A doctor who treated Bach and Handel with disastrous results
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
So of the things it we think of as antiquated an unhelpful such as using maggots to clean infected wounds and what not is actually making a comeback. Maggots are every good at dissolving and consuming dead/infected flesh and produce dozens of anti microbial compounds. And me be a critical tool as various strains develop resistance to antibiotics.
This comes up a lot because it's like the one single example and it's viscerally striking. Are there other examples though?
Medical leeches.
Re: A doctor who treated Bach and Handel with disastrous results
#70I was amused that the article claimed that loss of eyesight would end an era of music when Beethoven's loss of hearing certainly didn't end his compositional ability.
You're probably already aware, there is evidence that Beethoven was not completely deaf.
According to a leading Beethoven expert, the composer still had hearing in his left ear until shortly before his death in 1827.
“Not only was Beethoven not completely deaf at the premiere of his Ninth Symphony in May 1824, he could hear, although increasingly faintly, for at least two years afterwards, probably through the last premiere that he would supervise, his String Quartet in B-flat, Op 130, in March 1826,” Albrecht said.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/feb/01/beethoven-not-...