This is an interesting blog. Medicine was very primitive into the early 20th century - it took centuries for the old ineffective techniques to die out. Planck's observation was paraphrased as 'science advances one funeral at a time', but Medicine resisted advancement for hundreds of years. Hustlers [0] were probably the greatest obstacle to medical progress.
[0] I don't mean this as 'con artist', but people who think they're more competent than they actually are. There's probably a better term...
Maybe it had to do with literacy - effective techniques weren't propagated more quickly because they were passed down to apprentices, rather than published widely. I enjoyed this post:
The baby was breach, and did not survive. The illiterate midwife showed up 12 days after labor had begun, extracted the dead baby, sewed the woman up with silk thread and tailor's needles, and applied a salve made with egg whites. A literate surgeon visited a few days after the operation, and wrote a report for Medical Essays and Observations.
[0] I don't mean this as 'con artist', but people who think they're more competent than they actually are. There's probably a better term...
Maybe it had to do with literacy - effective techniques weren't propagated more quickly because they were passed down to apprentices, rather than published widely. I enjoyed this post:
A caesarean section in 18th-century Ireland - Irish midwife Mary Donally saved a woman's life by performing a c-section in 1738. - https://thequackdoctor.substack.com/p/a-caesarean-section-in...
The baby was breach, and did not survive. The illiterate midwife showed up 12 days after labor had begun, extracted the dead baby, sewed the woman up with silk thread and tailor's needles, and applied a salve made with egg whites. A literate surgeon visited a few days after the operation, and wrote a report for Medical Essays and Observations.