Hindsight is a wonderful thing. It enables us to feel superior to our ignorant forebears and marvel at their obtuseness. And the history of medicine offers more than its fair share of examples of wrong-headedness posing as authoritative wisdom. It is only when we apply the lessons of the past to present-day situations that we start to wonder how much better we will look to our historically minded descendants when they come to write the history of cancer, say, in the second half of the 20th century.
Sandra Hempel writes of cholera in the 19th century that
people already dying an agonising death also ran the risk of being boiled, steamed and scalded; of having the linings of their mouths, stomachs and intestines seared with acid and their systems poisoned with deadly metallic salts, while draughts of blood were drained from their arms, powerful emetics poured down their throats and substances like turpentine squirted into their rectums
and all in the name of treatment. As she goes on to say, ‘What the medical men lacked in skill and knowledge, many of them more than made up for in professional pride.’
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