Wednesday Open Comments

Listen closely…and/or read the following transcript.

From Bob Graboyes speech at the Health Care Administrators Asscociation meeting in New York City:

I’m going to talk about two intertwined themes which have become the mainstay of what I talk about. There are two deep, deep problems that medicine, and more generally healthcare, have. One is a tendency to reject valid, legitimate scientific dissent—orthodoxy. The second is medical doctors and others who are focused on social action projects, rather than on individual patients. And I’m going to say two things: One, this problem, especially during COVID-19, has become markedly worse and is getting worse by the day. And the second part is, it is going to bite everybody in this room if something isn’t done to change the course we are on.

Now, as I say in some of my essays, this is not a new problem. In fact, the part about politicization and and rejection of scientific dissent is at least an 1,800-year-old problem in medicine. And the other problem, the focusing on groups rather than on individuals, is at least a 140-year-old problem. 1,800 years ago, the Greek-Roman physician Galen—probably tied with Hippocrates as the greatest figure in Ancient Western medicine. He gave us many or maybe most of the big specialties—pharmacology and urology and all of those were essentially his inventions.

plus,

And about 300 years later, in the 1500s, a Spanish physician by the name of Miguel Serveto (or Michael Servetus, as we know him) for the first time wrote down and marked the correct system, which was that the heart has four chambers, with a set of capillaries running into the lungs and back. He wrote it out. It was the first time in history it had been written. He was thanked by the church at the time by a condemnation to death. He fled from the Catholic realms into Switzerland hoping that the Protestants would give him better shake. John Calvin ordered him burned at the stake. Not just for his medical beliefs, but it was embedded in theological debate about the basis of the Holy Trinity and that sort of thing. But in part for saying that the heart had four chambers, he was burned to death.

But John Calvin and the Roman Catholic Church believed in The Science, don’t you know.

This belief lasted into our own country. Benjamin Rush, the only physician to sign the Declaration of Independence, the greatest doctor in early America, was an absolute fanatical devotee of this. In 1793,  during an epidemic in Philadelphia, Rush believed firmly that the way you stopped this thing is by removing 75% of the blood from anybody. And so, his front yard looked like the French Revolution, and his reputation ultimately was ruined by it.

Damn, and he was my ancestor…,

There’s a long list of things that happened because of miasmism two of the most notable ones were Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician, discovered that if physicians wash their hands between going from one mother in childbirth to another or especially from the cadaver room to the mothers—if they simply wash their hands with a solution—that the death rates for babies and mothers drop precipitously. He was viewed as insulting the cleanliness of doctors declared a heretic.

Doctors fabricated data to refute him. They ultimately imprisoned him in a mental institution where, almost immediately, he was beaten to death by guards—or beaten severely and died of an infection from the beating about two or three weeks later.

Dr. Semmelweis was murdered in a filthy prison at the age of 47 barely 150 years ago, in 1865, for telling other doctors to wash their hands while delivering newborn babies.

But, hey, they believed in The Science !

In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court bought into this. As a result, in the ensuing decades, 70,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized—most of them for ridiculous reasons. And if you think it ended a while ago, the end of that era, so far as we know, came when California finally stopped sterilizing prisoners in 2014.

Scholars, writers and historians can make all their claims about the human race and modernity, but we have barely stumbled out of a primitive, dark existence of depravity and it appears human beings have rejected this morality and are choosing to walk backwards into the darkness.

Pray and then…

RTWDT.