Canada's premiere creationist IDiot begins by, apparently, trying to make a point by quoting:
The history of medicine begins with Hippocrates in the fifth century BC. Yet until the invention of antibiotics in the 1940s doctors, in general, did their patients more harm than good.
In other words, for 2400 years patients believed doctors were doing good; for 2300 years they were wrong.
Um ... all right, Denyse, I'm assuming you're going somewhere with this ... ah, there it is:
We know how to write histories of discovery and progress, but not how to write histories of stasis, of delay, of digression. We know how to write about the delight of discovery, but not about attachment to the old and resistance to the new...
Strangely, traditional medical practices — bloodletting, purging, inducing vomiting — had continued even while people's understanding of how the body worked underwent radical alteration. The new theories were set to work to justify old practices.
So ... what we're doing here is mocking the concept of, um, people who, faced with new knowledge and new scientific discoveries, tried desperately to re-interpret that knowledge to still be compatible with a long-standing, primitive, superstitious, scientifically illiterate worldview. Is that what we're mocking here, Denyse? No, seriously, do you really want to go down that road?
I'm just asking.
4 comments:
An many of those modern medical discoveries came from doctors studying anatomy using cadavers *against* the dictates of certain religious types.
And, of course, evolution isn't real, so all those bacteria becoming immune to antibiotics must be the WILL OF GOD, so we should just accept it and die like the mindless sheep we are supposed to be.
In other news, the Pope claims that condoms help spread AIDS:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090317.wpope0317/BNStory/International/home
"He had never directly addressed condom use. He has said the Roman Catholic Church is in the forefront of the battle against AIDS. The Vatican encourages sexual abstinence to fight the spread of the disease.
“You can't resolve it with the distribution of condoms,” the pope told reporters aboard the Alitalia plane headed to Yaounde, Cameroon, where he will begin a seven-day pilgrimage on the continent. “On the contrary, it increases the problem.”
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The Pope need not worry. He probably has all those little boys tested for diseases prior to their private audiences with his holeliness.
It is highly dubious that ancient medicine, taken in context was worth than nothing. At times, yes, but for significant periods it was better than nothing, which is why the wealthy continued to see and employ doctors. The ancients weren't stupid, just more limited. Some of them even seem to have intuited the idea of cancer metastasis, for example.
Of course, she's also overlooked that bloodletting (mechanical or leeches), purging and inducing vomiting are actually still used today as necessary and effective treatments for a number of ailments in science-based medicine, or that other archaic treatments are being revisited to see if Traditional knowledge has a physical, repeatable basis, and if so, just what components serve that basis.
Oddly, exorcism and prayer trials haven't made the cut of reproducibility past placebo, a sure sign that science in medicine is a reality-biased conspiracy worthy of Ms O's attention. I have to wonder if she uses homeopathic and other 'alternate' health treatments when she's sick, just to teach the controversy by example.
wv: smsmsy - 'self mutilation syndrome whimsy' as in Ms. O'Leary is experiencing a serious bout of smsmsy.
Speaking of UD, apparently DaveScot managed to get himself fired from Dembski's Crib for revealing an inconvenient truth about Christianity and racism.
wv="undec" Between this and calling Denyse O'Looney a "morphodyke," someone needs to undec DaveScot...
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