It’s often been
said that people in the 18th century only lived to be about 35 years
old. It’s also been said that people lived longer if they kept away from
doctors.
Medicine in the
1700’s was nothing like ours today. Germ theory was still over a hundred years
away. Anatomy was in its infancy – religions forbade the dissection of humans,
and so animals were cut up and results were extrapolated from there. (Humans
were believed to have a liver shaped in distinct ‘lobes” since many animals
do.) Doctors did not even yet understand that blood circulates through the
human body.
Disease was
attributed to “bad air” or “bad water” or perhaps an “imbalance in the humors
of the body.”
The belief in “bad
water” had its roots in contaminated wells and springs, but was not rooted in
any understanding of pollution or seeping ground water. A dead cow two miles
away might be contaminating a community’s water, but no one had any way to
discover this. Instead, villages held ceremonies around wells or springs that
did not kill people, offering flowers and songs to bribe the spring to
remain healthy. Reliably healthy water sources (think: Lourdes) developed
reputations as places of healing. Certainly a person slowly dying from polluted
water had a chance to recover in such a place.
Most people, if
they could afford it, rarely drank water. The 3-4 percent alcohol content in
beer killed most of the germs, so even children drank it. And with the belief
in bad water came a terror of washing. If the water was contaminated, and there
was no reliable way to find out if it was, washing in it might be deadly. This
kept a vicious cycle of dirt going.
Belief in ‘bad air’
was probably linked to air-borne sickness, but was also a result of night-time
mosquito raids. Burning herbs kept bugs at bay, and may have killed some germs.
At any rate, they made people feel better, and the practice of fumigating a
home with smoke was popular. It also, however, led to a terror of fresh air, a
situation that was often unhealthy.
Doctors of the time
were still practicing “philosophical medicine.” Someone- a contemporary learned
man, an ancient Greek philosopher, put forward a theory, and if it sounded good
people believed it. No one had yet thought of experimenting to find out if
methods worked, and the placebo effect gave enough good results that doctors
continued their odd treatments.
The human body was
believed to run off of the interaction of four liquids, or humors. These were
blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. These had to exist in the proper
proportions, and if they did not, the doctor would determine which was in
overabundance and treat the patient to remove this humor.
To this end,
patients were given concoctions to cause violent vomiting or violent diarrhea.
It was believed that this regulated bile. People suffering from internal
parasites may have benefitted by this. Regulating phlegm was done with diet,
limiting a patient to only cold food or adding certain herbs to the diet.
Most famous was the
practice of bleeding patients. Bleeding was so common that it was most often
practiced by barbers, who also practiced as surgeons, the lowest sort of
doctor. Contemporary accounts describe people who felt that it was time to be
bled going to a barbershop and allowing the staff to open a vein until they
bled out about a pint of blood. Then the wound was closed, the barber was paid,
and the patient went about his or her business. A busy barbershop might have a
trough to divert streams of blood into the street, where local dogs lapped it
up.
The practice of
bleeding continued into the early 1900’s, as old-fashioned doctors continued
the practice based on the theory that “we’ve always done this” and “what harm
can it do?”
Barbers were also
surgeons. They cut out tumors, removed gangrenous flesh and lopped off badly
damaged or severely infected limbs.
Doctors did not often get involved in this, as it wasn’t scientific.
Without any form of anesthetic, the patient was tied down, plied with alcohol
until he or she was blackout drunk, and then the cutting began. Getting the
work done quickly minimized shock, and made it more likely the patient would
survive.
A doctor might
treat the wound after the surgery was done, but most patients died of
infection. In fact, infection was so common that the medical establishment
considered “pus’ to be a stage of healing, and if a patient had a clean wound
that did not produce pus, the doctor might introduce some from another
patient’s “properly” healing wound to
put things right.
All in all, any
person’s best chance of living to ripe old age involved being lucky enough to
have an immune system with the ferocity of a ravening lion and to keep as far
away from doctors as possible.
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