BAD MEDICINE DOCTORS DOING HARM SINCE HIPPOCRATES doc

[...]... Hippocratic doctors turned into scientific doctors But there is another reason, and that is that the new doctors kept on doing the equivalent of casting horoscopes Until the invention of penicillin in 1941 there was very little doctors could do about most infections; even the new science left them virtually powerless in the face of disease They had no alternative but to keep up the age-old pretence that medicine. .. continuous tradition of Hippocratic medicine, and for century after century patients turned to their doctors to be cured For two and a quarter millennia doctors insisted that medicine was a science that saved lives But there were critics from the very beginning An ancient work called The Science of Medicine, which dates to c.375 bc, is the first defence of Hippocratic medicine against its critics The philosopher... two-thirds Hippocratic medicine was bad medicine in that it killed when it claimed to cure 2 This woodcut, reproduced from Guido Guidi, Opera Varia (Lyons, 1599), first appears in 1544 It accompanies a text by the fourth-century Byzantine medical writer Oribasius Hippocrates Fractures is included in the same volume 10 introduction: bad medicine ⁄ better medicine Of course Hippocrates did not know... to 12 introduction: bad medicine ⁄ better medicine discover the fact that Hippocratic medicine was not itself a science, but a fantasy of science The whole of medicine before 1865 was caught up in a fantasy world One reason for this appearance of continuity, this peculiar insistence that the history of medicine begins with Hippocrates, not with Pasteur or with Lister, is that in medicine the astrologers... introduction: bad medicine ⁄ better medicine 7 been so long-enduring, so constant, so intimate that nobody foresaw its end, and nobody celebrated its death Hippocratic medicine had no funeral, no memorial, no obituary Instead there was an almost wilful determination to pretend that modern medicine was a natural development from Hippocratic medicine, that Hippocrates could still be the doctor’s daily... Illich published Limits to Medicine and Thomas McKeown published The Modern Rise of Population, and 1995, when J P Bunker published an essay entitled introduction: bad medicine ⁄ better medicine 5 Medicine Matters After All’, there was a serious body of intellectual opinion which held that medicine had made no real difference to life expectancy, that the achievements of modern medicine were just as illusory... modern medicine, but as the story of the final crisis of ancient medicine A central claim of this book is that one of the most interesting things about medicine is that it works, and that we therefore need to study progress in medicine We can only think about medical progress if we start with the long tradition of medical failure We need to begin with bad medicine if we are to understand better medicine. .. therapies began to be devised The knowledge about human physiology and the diagnostic techniques that had been accumulated by doctors over time took on a new significance once introduction: bad medicine ⁄ better medicine 17 they could be used to enable effective therapies; in that sense modern doctors have been able to draw on reserves of knowledge accumulated over centuries, just as modern astronomers could... example, said that doctors tormented the sick, and were just as bad as the diseases they claimed to cure It was Heraclitus, not the author of The Science of Medicine, who had the better argument, for Hippocratic medicine was incapable of fulfilling its promises This should be obvious, but modern commentators are unable to admit this simple fact They persist in treating The Science of Medicine as if it... difficulty facing up to this fact Historians of medicine are a diverse group, with widely differing views, but in general they no longer write about progress, and so they no longer seek to distinguish good medicine from bad Indeed they try to avoid what they think of as anachronistic evaluations: ‘only the most dyed-in-the-wool Whig introduction: bad medicine ⁄ better medicine 3 history still polarizes the past .