January 23, 2019 Wednesday
Bedtime Story
Coining of the term "Allopathic Medicine"
Homeopathy and ayurveda are perhaps two
most popular forms of alternative medicine that continues to hold sway and
enchant us fellow apes when allopathic medicine fails to work (when diseases
are incurable in other words).
I suspect though that each country of the
world will be having their own favorite alternatives to the medicine as I
understand it to be.
The term “allopathic medicine” was coined
by Hahnemann himself as a disparaging term for modern medicine which in his
time was anything but modern.
He coined this term in 1810 and till this
very day it remains extremely popular among the Hindus, especially the elite educated
Hindus who are in general suspicious of everything but medicine in particular
since it is first and foremost “Western” and secondly it is made up of “chemicals”.
These elite Hindus whose life is anything
but natural seem to have intense fascination for things that are “natural”.
I had narrated to you in one or two of my
bedtime stories that in Hahnemann period germ theory of disease was virtually
non-existent, pharmacological preparations as I was taught in medicine
completely lacking and surgical hand scrubbing unknown.
Just imagine a surgeon walking into an
operation theatre whose state we can now imagine would have been no different
from any ordinary room and operating upon a nearly blind eye on an old frail
patient using most primate surgical technique with no aseptic precautions!
What outcome would you expect from such
butchery of “modern medicine”?
It is therefore not surprising that the
founder of homeopathy was both derisive and critical of it.
I am quite sure most of us apes including
medical doctors would be completely ignorant of Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, a
Hungarian physician of ethnic-German ancestry.
This good doctor lived just to be 45 when
in 1865 he was beaten by the guards of an asylum where he was committed to
after suffering series of nervous break downs (largely depression and
absentmindedness though his public behavior became incompatible with accepted
civic norms accompanied as it with change in his sexual behavior).
Following the thrashing by the guards the
doctor died of septicemia or to be more precise pyemia which is a special type of
septicemia that is characterized by widespread abscesses all over inside the
various organs something akin to metastasis in cancer.
As a physician Semmelweis was posted as an
assistant to a professor of the First Obstetricial Clinic the Vienna General
Hospital.
It was something akin to today’s medical position
of chief or senior resident in a teaching university-affiliated hospital.
In those days incidence of postpartum
infections also known as childbed fever or puerperal fever was significantly
high.
Postpartum infections are bacterial
infections of female reproductive organs or tract following child birth or a
miscarriage.
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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