Category: Medical Matters

Family Medicine circa 1692

Medicinal Experiments

Maynard Mack (1909-2001), Alexander Pope: A Life (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1985), pp. 15-16:

But even such prescriptions pale beside many of those receiving sanction from the distinguished chemist Robert Boyle in his Medicinal Experiments of 1692, one of the most popular family handbooks of the period. Among other recipes more palatable, one for sore throat, as common an ailment among children then as now, proposes “a drachm of white dog’s turd” worked up with honey of roses into “a linctus, to be very slowly let down the throat.” Another—”For Convulsions, especially in Children”—requires ground dried earthworms fortified with “a pretty number of grains of ambergrease” to moderate the stench. A third—”For the Cholic and diverse other Distempers”—features an infusion made of “four or five balls of fresh stone-horse dung” steeped in a pint of white wine, to be drunk “from a quarter to half a pint” at a dose. Easily the Mount Everest and Mona Lisa among these unappealing remedies is the following, used “To clear the Eyes, even of films”: Take human fecal matter “of good Colour and consistence,” dry it slowly “till it be pulverable,” then reduce it “into an impalpable powder, which is to be blown once, twice, or thrice a day … into the patient’s Eyes.”

# posted by Michael Gilleland @ 1:21 PM

Hypatia and Her Lover

An excerpt from the journal of Basile Yanovsky, M.D. reprinted in Michael Rubin, Men Without Masks: Writings from the Journals of Modern Men (Addison-Wesley, 1980), p. 206:

A woman philosopher and religious teacher of the fourth century, Hypatia of Alexandria, had a striking discussion with her lover. To discourage his earthly temptations, she addressed him, at the most passionate moment of their relations, in the following manner: “See what it is you adore, Archytas, this foul matter, this corruption, with its secretions, its excrements and its infections. . . .”

But the tenacious and passionate Archytas gave her this answer: “It is not matter I love, but form.”

How many times, discouraged and depressed in the V. D. clinic, have I repeated these saintly words of Archytas. . . .

In the New York Review of Books, in Veni, Vici, V. D., W. H. Auden reviews Dr. Yanovsky’s The Dark Fields of Venus: From a Doctor’s Logbook.

Trump’s Magnificent MAHA Team

MAHA goes back a long way. Some of us are old enough to remember John F. Kennedy's stirring call to national fitness. It made a difference in our lives. If only Uncle Jack could see his nephew Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. teamed up with four distinguished medical doctors, Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makary, Vinay Prasad, and Mehmet Oz.  

True (conservative) diversity and true (conservative) inclusion!  And no 'equity' in sight. Merit, excellence, achievement.  

Three of the doctors mentioned, health heretics in the dismal, dark, and demented days of Joey B's admin, are now health czars.

You may enjoy watching the forcible removal of some leftist reprobates who attempted to disrupt an RFK, Jr. hearing. A little schadenfreude never hurt anybody.

The Left’s Ideological Capture of the American Academy of Pediatrics

Here:

At the same time, the organization [the AAP] began uncritically embracing political positions popular on the left, calling for “the strongest possible regulations of handguns for civilian use,” for example, and going all-in on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. The AAP’s “sample language for office forms,” for example, lists nine possible gender identities, eight possible sexual orientations, and asks, “What sex were you assigned at birth?” The guidance insists that pediatricians announce their pronouns to patients and ask about children’s gender identity during every visit, while also “degenderizing” their own language by using phrases such as “as a person who has a uterus” rather than “as a woman.” The AAP also supports policies that allow biological males to play on female sports teams, and its recommendations have been cited in lawsuits brought by trans activists against states that have banned boys in girls’ sports.

This garbage is beneath refutation.  The best way to combat it is by executive order, which is what President Trump did in Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.

The Coronal Threat is Overblown . . .

. . . and is being exploited by the fascists of the Left to clamp down on our civil liberties, weaken the Trump economy and with it President Trump's re-election chances,  and to destroy the Republic to prepare the way for socialism. Or is it the multi-pronged claim I just bruited that is overblown?  You will have to decide that for yourself. But the recent scumbaggery of leftists such as Nancy 'the Ripper' Pelosi (see my man Hanson infra for a listing of some of her recent outrages) allows us no confidence in their probity.  They are to be presumed guilty until proven innocent. Such is required by my political burden of proof.  Better safe than sorry when dealing with leftist swine and their deadly flu.

I now hand off to Bill Bennett and Seth Leibsohn (bolding added):

But do you know the odds of any American getting this virus?  One would think that number is easily known or available.  It’s not. A lot of digging into various municipal data portals reveals, based on the population tested, that rates can vary from, at most, eight-tenths of a percent in New York City to two-one-hundredths of a percent in Phoenix. [.02 %]

Did you know the chances of recovery from the coronavirus are about 98%—if you catch it?  Did you know there are models showing 50% of the population may have already had it, never knew they had it, and recovered?  Again, one would think this data would be widely available and reported.  It isn’t. What is presented widely are numbers and warnings that scare and frighten us, and we are now being conditioned to a lot of panic and speculation.  But part of the reason we are getting conditioned to a lot of panic is because of the wide range of speculation about other numbers we accept as our new fright-inducing reality, an increasingly confusing and frenzied set of numbers.  And the normalization of our panic is having dire consequences and augurs for even worse.

[. . .]

Is it too much to ask for some perspective with numbers we do know about, numbers which have never shut down our country, much less a church or synagogue, much less entire industries; numbers which have never restricted travel or put this nation into one big frenzy? In any given month in America, we lose about 54,000 Americans to heart disease; 50,000 to cancer; 14,000 to asthma, bronchitis, and emphysema; 12,000 to stroke; 10,000 to Alzheimer’s; 7,000 to diabetes; 5,600 to drug overdoses; and 4,700 to influenza and pneumonia. Since February, in America, coronavirus: 9,500. Where is the sympathy for the victims and families of those other causes of death? The daily mortality count? The blaring headlines? The upending of the country? We hear almost nothing about them. Those deaths give us over 157,000 deaths a month. Given all that is being done about one cause of death, COVID-19, it turns out this is a very advantaged disease, indeed. And we will in time develop a vaccine for it, not to mention more and more good news coming in the short term about treatments from other extant medicines like hydroxychloroquine.

Read it all.  And don't forget: people will die from the economic depression caused by the draconian lockdown. It is morally moronic to opine, as NY Governor Cuomo did, that the extreme measures are justified if they save just one life.

Coronavirus and Secession

F. H. Buckley maintains that the first could hasten the second. 

We might have hoped that the pandemic would give us a respite from the nastiness of our politics, but not a bit of it. There’s a mild Trump bounce, as the president takes charge of leading the nation through the crisis, but the Trump paranoia continues unabated. Sec. Azar declared a public health emergency on January 31 and announced travel restrictions to and from China. At the time no one had a clue about how serious a problem it would be, and Joe Biden put the travel ban down to xenophobia and fear-mongering.

Xenophobia! What a senile idiot that Biden is! (Lately senile, he was always an idiot.) Does he know what the word means?

Apart from the White House, the coronavirus was on no one’s mind. Instead, impeachment took up all the air in the room. The House had voted articles of impeachment on December 18, 2019, and this dominated the news until Trump’s acquittal on February 5. Obviously, other issues such as the coronavirus took up less of the president’s time than would otherwise have been the case, but if you thought he might have been cut some slack you’d be wrong. Instead, Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff want to impanel a Coronavirus Response Commission to investigate the president.

Last Wednesday the New York Times provided a map showing the places where people traveled as the virus spread. In the North people stopped moving around by March 24, but in the former Confederate states people continued to travel more than two miles from home. Since infection rates are far lower in those areas, that’s not surprising. The Times also failed to mention that people also have a greater reason to travel in the Deep South, where stores are further apart. The story was thus a gratuitous swipe at a region that the paper’s readers could be expected to hate.

We used to be better than this. But since Donald Trump’s election a poison has entered America’s soul. It’s driven us apart and made the idea of a breakup more inviting. Non sumus qualis eramus.

F.H. Buckley is a professor at Scalia Law School and the author of American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup

I agree, except for the penultimate sentence. The poison has been present for a long time in the American soul. Trump has merely made its presence more evident by standing up and fighting for the conservative cause, something that milque-toast Mitt and his ilk were unwilling and incapable of doing.  Trump hasn't driven us apart; we already were apart. But by taking up the fight in earnest, Trump has driven the Left mad and forced them to show their true colors.  

The Latin sentence translates as "We are not as we were." It is Buckley's adaptation of Non sum qualis eram.

Arizona Governor Issues Stay-at-Home Order

Here:

Gov. Doug Ducey on Monday issued a statewide "stay-at-home" order to slow the spread of the new coronavirus, preventing Arizonans from leaving their residences except for food, medicine and other "essential activities."

The directive, which also allows for outdoor exercise, will take effect upon close of business Tuesday [3/31] and apply through at least April 30.

You extroverts will suffer, and it will be a moral challenge for us introverts to contain our Schadenfreude.