Medical History Books

One of my hobbies is buying up pre-antibiotic medical books. If you look at the history of western medicine, it’s often been a wash: it’s still not all that clear if letting a doctor treat you is a better idea than staying home, eating right, exercising and minding your own business.  For example: click here.  For stuff like bullet holes, doctors are pretty good from all the practice they get in war and American inner cities. Doctors are also good for prescribing antibiotics; antibiotics are the last big, epoch making breakthrough in medical technology. Public health innovations, such as not drinking toilet water, anesthesia, doctors washing their hands, and making sure people have sufficient vitamins (the ones we know about): these are the past big ones that really moved the needle.

Seeing how people lived before antibiotics and what kind of things they had to deal with, and what kinds of treatments were available is interesting. It’s a sort of history of private life that doesn’t occur to modern people. We’ve all lived in the post-antibiotic era (my grandparents experienced some life before antibiotics); it’s shaped everything from our morals and politics to our eating habits.

Devils, Drugs and Doctors by Howard Wilcox Haggard (1913) tells the story of how medicine developed before antibiotics. Western medicine at that point could be boiled down to a couple of simple ideas that we all take for granted now. It’s worth remembering  that medical authorities often fought these simple ideas tooth and nail. This book is a nice history of this sort of thing and should be required reading for anyone interested in human health.

The book traces the history of childbirth from ancient Greek times up until Semmelweis discovered the value in clean hands and sterile birthing tools. Anesthesia is also a fairly recent invention; one objected to strenuously by the powers that be as being unnatural and bad for the patient. Surgery and anatomy have a history, as does the pharmacopia: the latter is particularly fascinating as drugs were often sort of religious in their origins.

The Germ Theory of Disease was also long considered a sort of conspiracy theory: it took various amateur autists decades of work before they convinced the government to remove water pumps downstream of the toilet. To say nothing of the removal of rats as a public good: something our public health officials in current year could use some help with. Various plague prevention and vaccination efforts are described: handshakes went out of fashion in the past as well -generally for no good reason, as many of those plagues were spread by rats rather than handshakes.

Nutrition: the existence of the known vitamins is something which we now take for granted; something extremely important to public health. It also makes one wonder about the potential existence of other vitamins or mineral deficiencies or commonly consumed antinutrients. This is the sort of thing that should really activate the almonds: nutritionists are generally morons who memorize lists. Data science may be able to discern things via crowdsourcing that were not previously available to researchers. There are lots of indications out there that the soy protein, seed oils, high fructose corn syrup and other garbage that Americans live off of are bad for you: just look at the cut of their jibs compared to those of societies who eat meat, grease, butter and olive or sesame oil. The data scientists of old were able to come to their conclusion with primitive contingency table type tools: surely ubiquitous computards could help us get to the bottom of more things. Particularly now when image recognition is presumably useful enough to take a snapshot of a meal, identify it and its ingredients, macronutrients and micronutrients. Meanwhile, try not to eat things which your most healthy ancestors didn’t eat. I like mash potato (to be fair rice and ancient varieties of wheat have a more encouraging history than a member of the nightshade family, but I’m part Irish so I should be OK).

The chapter on sexual promiscuity and brothels is particularly fascinating and changed my mind forever on the origins of sexual morality, or our current unique lack thereof. Sexual promiscuity was basically death and disease before the invention of antibiotics. Syphilis entered widespread circulation during a time of sexual degeneracy (it may have been around longer: the controversy existed in the time of this book and persists to today), and for years wasn’t considered so bad; a disease of gentlemen who could afford lots of company: sort of like HIV is now in some circles. Gonorrhea was also a terrible disease, often lethal in spectacularly horrifying ways: where it wasn’t it caused lots of blindness in infants. The section on prostitution through history is also interesting to the antiquarian: did you know flowered robes was the uniform of Ancient Greek cortesans? I didn’t! And yes, through history, before the invention of antibiotics, prostitutes were the primary carriers of venereal disease. The ridiculous virus-discovering promiscuity of gay men, and the general democratization of prostitute-like promiscuity among normal women was only possible with antibiotics. It’s interesting in that this pre-Freudian book noticed that sexual sublimation which was so normal before antibiotics was responsible for a great deal of art and technological creativity. The book also examines the sorts of abnormal psychology that comes of excessive sexual repression which is both epic and largely forgotten. The various accommodations to prostitution and reactions against it as public health measure (as well as its entanglement with morality) are pretty fascinating reading; also largely forgotten.

The Modern Home Physician (1934). I picked this up the other month to see what their recipe for infant formula is, since the powers that be in modern 2022 era American society insist that you couldn’t possibly make your own, and you must feed your infant a mass of corn syrup and soy solids or they’ll immediately drop dead (for the record; cow milk diluted with barley water, a bit of cream and sugar -wet nurses preferred even then). I stuck around for smallpox (considered only a danger in uncivilized countries at that point); unfortunately smallpox has a multi-week incubation period; something I guess post-covid gay men recently rediscovered about its cousin monkeypox. Amusingly it was not yet understood what organism caused influenza when this book was written; there were a number of organisms potentially to blame besides virus. They thought of that also; the idea of a virus was something which couldn’t be filtered out of a culture. They didn’t think it was possible it was the virus on its own. Honestly I’m still not sure influenza (and ‘rona) is dangerous on its own: those old timey doctors weren’t dumb. There is strong evidence a lot of the colds and covids of the world need some kinds of bacteria to spread and become serious: it is perhaps one of the several reasons why even though taking antibiotics isn’t supposed to work for a virus, yet it often does. BTW this is another place moderns could go; we collect all kinds of genetic material from living sick and healthy and dead people. Somehow it doesn’t sit in a database somewhere someone like me could go run the equivalent of a trading algorithm backtest on it (aka simple statistics and design of experiment work most public health dorks will never understand). This is the sort of thing which is completely knowable with modern tools, but which we really don’t know. At some point it became accepted ideology virumses ride on their own, despite our ancestors thinking otherwise. Maybe they were right?

Safe Counsel or Practical Eugenics (1928) This is the kind of book parents give their adult children when they get married. It’s not as spicy as you might think, but it’s a lot of fun anyway. FWIIW this was written at the peak of the US eugenics laws, yet there’s only a perfunctory mention of the laws in the first chapter. Most of it is classic “how sex works” written for uptight 1920s WASPs. There’s a lot of standard doctors advice on avoiding tobacco and booze which hasn’t changed much. On the other hand there is a lot of quite good advice you won’t get from current year doctors on gaining weight, losing weight, exercise and various sexual and mental dysfunctions. This is a tragedy of course, and this is the kind of thing right thinking people should read these old books for. Dumbasses popping a fruit salad of SSRIs when they might try bed rest and ceasing incessant baloney bopping like the old timey doctors said to. Of course they weren’t always right: they advised bedrest for heart attacks for no good reason, and that advice probably killed some people. This is quite a famous meme book in that some of its plates have been converted into 4chan memes about roasties and wankers. Reading it has provoked laughter among folks who have picked it up off my shelves, and yet…. Sexual degeneracy in 1916 was basically a death sentence. If your partner cheated on you with a prostitute or a man of loose morals, syphilis was incurable and gonorrhea was still a leading cause of death and blindness in children. Mind you, you can catch syphilis from snogging. Imagine your virgin daughter slowly rotting to death because some bounder took the diabolical liberty of smooching with her at the cinema. I’ve always said the sexual revolution had zilch to do with birth control pills; antibiotics are what made it possible. The section on “self pollution” are what usually cracks modern people up, but the description of the physical and psychological results of excessive wanking are, effectively, a description of modern neurotic dorks. People unable to look you in the eye, who  require spicy food, are glassy-eyed foul tempered and filled with ennui. Hey, maybe it’s just a coincidence (you fucking wanker). Muh SCIENCE says there’s no evidence it makes you go blind either.

Nature’s Secrets Revealed: Scientific Knowledge of the Laws of Sex Life and Heredity (1916). This is pretty much same thing as previous, though the cartoons aren’t as meme worthy (they’re actually quite artistic and interesting; like WW-1 bond propaganda).  Lots of the same as above, but frankly significantly higher IQ. I suppose it’s possible the former is a dumbed down version of this one. It’s interesting in that it gives a lot of advice for home care for, for example tubercular patients and other chronically disabled people. If you pay attention to books  written in those days you hear about people going to Arizona to recover from tuberculosis, but the reality for most was a lot more grim. Most people couldn’t afford to go to tuberculosis camp, so they withered away at home. While medical care in the US is an expensive trash fire today, in the old days there really wasn’t much to be done, so people had to be sick at home.