November 13, 2014
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“You consider Mr. Slasher a good operator?” said Mr. Pickwick. “Best alive,” replied Hopkins. “Took a boy’s leg out of the socket last week”boy ate five apples and a gingerbread cake”exactly two minutes after it was all over, boy said he wouldn”t lie there to be made game of, and he”d tell his mother if they didn”t begin.”
Premodern drugs were just as scary. The only ones that worked were quinine, for malaria, and digitalis, for heart failure. The rest were basically poisons: arsenic, bismuth, strychnine, mercury (though mercury’s only poisonous if overconsumed through foodstuffs or inhaled as a vapor). James Boswell “treated” his numerous doses of the clap by staying indoors for several weeks, injecting mercury into his urethra until the lesions healed.
Cold-eyed realists knew it was all nonsense. Flaubert, for example: Madame Bovary‘s doctor husband is merely a fool, but Homais the town pharmacist is a crook.
Are we any wiser nowadays? We surely have far better real medicine, and marvelous surgery. Rituxan saved my life, and a friend recently got a new knee. A new knee! Churchill’s quip no longer applies: Most of today’s work is done by people who feel fine.
Colds, allergies, migraines, and insomnia are with us as much as ever, though. We spend scads of money on treatments every bit as bogus as Boswell’s mercury. As ebola’s been reminding us, most virus infections are incurable and have to run their course. The youngest science is now a science, but it’s still young.
