December 31, 2018 Monday
Bedtime Story
Bloodletting Disgusted Hahnemann
Obviously one case report is no
justification for coming to any definite conclusion and hence simply because
leach-induced bloodletting did not work in my nurse’s case is no ground for
dismissal of ayurveda as a system of medicine.
We shall tackle the efficacy of ayurveda as
an alternative medical system much beloved of Hindus and a source of great
(much sought after) pride after dealing with homeopathy in the nights to come.
Samuel Hahnemann was perspicacious enough
to come to the conclusion that bloodletting was obviously dissatisfactory to
say the least.
Dissatisfied with the prevailing system of
medicine in 1780s (which effectively there was none) he candidly admitted that
the medicine that he was trained to practice did more harm to the patients than
good.
At least we owe him some measure of respect
for accepting the bitter truth that all his time and effort spent on training
as a physician was spent on something utterly useless and even dangerous:
“My sense of duty would not easily allow me
to treat the unknown pathological state of my suffering brethren with these
unknown medicines.
The thought of becoming in this way a
murderer or malefactor towards the life of my fellow human beings was most
terrible to me, so terrible and disturbing that I wholly gave up my practice in
the first years of my married life and occupied myself solely with chemistry
and writing.”
He completely discarded the horrendous
system of bloodletting and tormented by guilt that doctors (including him) were
actually harming the patients rather than treating them gave up practice of
medicine.
And yet what he unleashed on to the world
was an equally ineffective system of alternative medicine albeit not as
dangerous as bloodletting.
In some sense it was progress as a
transition was being made from a dangerous form of treatment to a much safer
one albeit an equally ineffective one that was based on an extremely fickle
observation of the effect Cinchona bark on malaria.
Do you know how the plant got this name?
It was the legendary Swedish botanist,
zoologist and physician Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy and the
establisher of the binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming all
species who named this genus as so in 1742.
He came to hear that the plant had cured
the wife of a Spanish nobleman and captain general and Viceroy of Peru and the
4th Count of Chinchón.
Chinchón today is a small town and municipality
about 50 kilometers south east of Madrid in Spain.
When the nobleman was posted in Peru as the
viceroy his wife Ana de Osario in 1638 was afflicted with tertian fever and she
was given this bark to consume which cured her.
After her cure the very next year she
returned to Europe and carried with her a large quantity of this bark and it is
believed that this is how quinine got introduced into Europe.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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