The doctors in the 1800s were really fucking stupid

Oh damn, is this Arthur himself in the chair? He looked totally different in my game But yeah, I was thinking of the random encounter where the guy loses his arm (and you will all miss it if you don't just keep waiting there! Don't you love all these details in RDR that you only notice if you pay attention?), also because the convo was about amputation and infection. It also was at the same docs, hence why i thought the pic was about that

 

yeah, the pic was just about the rdr doc, not specifically about amputation.

i could be wrong, but i think that's arthur himself. mine looked pretty different too. i couldn't be fucked with grooming most of the time, for one thing.

 

15 Terrifying 18th Century Remedies for What Ails You

 

we believe that today's doctors have reached the pinnacle of medical knowledge, but what if 200 years from now people look back on today's doctors and their standard treatments the way we today look back on doctors and medical treatments of the 1700s and 1800s.

 

I think that I have read that more soldiers died of disease during the civil war than were killed in actual combat. whenever you get thousands of men together in armies there is always going to be germs & viruses start spreading. before the 20th century wars, I suspect this was always true - that more soldiers died of disease than combat.

 

steampunk rendition?

 

American Civil War surgeons were using state-of-the-art techniques learned in the Napoleonic Wars (when triage, the ambulance, aid station, and a professional Army Medical Corps was first invented). A "surgeon" in the 1860's was not what most people think. A medical degree took two years, had no entrance exams or prerequisites (other than a large pile of money), and offered no clinical experience; the first GSW an Army surgeon saw was probably the first one he treated. Comparatively speaking, a modern Paramedic has vastly more training and experience than a 19th century surgeon.
A Civil War rifled musket ball was subsonic, more than 1/2" across, and weighed more than an ounce. Made of soft lead, it mushroomed on impact and expended all of it's ballistic energy in the target; when it struck bone, long bones shattered like glass; soft tissue injuries resulted in massive irreparable evulsions. There were no reconstructive techniques for that sort of injury, and no antibiotics. Survival rates increased with amputation, and decreased without it due to septicemia ("Sterializeation" wouldn't even become a thing until long after 1870, when the first germ theory of disease was postulated). If anything, Army surgeons at the time were often criticized for being too reluctant to amputate, rather than too aggressive. Extremity wounds were actually considered fortuitous as they were potentially survivable; wounds to the torso were considered untreatable and almost universally fatal. As amputation was the only preferred treatment for treatable combat wounds, people started to refer to doctors in general as "sawbones".
Also, regimental surgeons were a scarce commodity. Only 1 in 15 were even allowed to amputate, and hadn't the luxury of time to spend on lengthy surgery. At Antietam, there were over 19,000 wounded in a single day. After a major battle, surgeons might be operating for three days straight without rest. Some could perform an amputation in two minutes, a mercy when you consider the scarcity of anesthesia. The term "bite the bullet" dates from this period, when a casualty was given a soft lead minié ball to bite on to stifle their screams.

Dulce bellum inexpertis.
Erasmus

 

These are Civil War bullets known as Minie Balls. They were designed to flatten out once they penetrated their targets, causing maximum internal damage, shattering bones and tearing tissues. They often left arms and legs so badly damaged that amputation was the only option.

 

I don't put much faith in Fauci.

 

non sequitur
non se·qui·tur | \ ˌnän-ˈse-kwə-tər
also -ˌtu̇r \
1 : an inference that does not follow from the premises.
2 : a statement (such as a response) that does not follow logically from or is not clearly related to anything previously said.

 

The picture's gone so here are some more





Brand new

 

Google why chainsaws were invented.....

 

Makes you wonder who's the dumber ass, an 1800s doctor who cuts off a limb to save a life, or a 2000s doctor who prescribes psychoactive drugs to suicidal patients even though the pills are stamped "MAY INCREASE RISK OF SUICIDE" Hmm...

 

I think the the min goal was to stop the bleeding, using cauterization. Most of the mini balls and rifled muskets were 50 to 58 caliber. The 45-70 came in with jacketed cartreges. These large rounds made big holes and caused a lot of tissue damage.

 

I beg to differ, nA. As a practicing physician, I am not a tool of big-pharma, nor a fan of pharmaceuticals.
Prescriptive meds have their place in treatment and management.
However, the true role of the physician is to listen-to and evaluate the patient, formulate a differential diagnosis, perform appropriate testing to identify the diagnosis, then educate the patient while establishing a treatment regimen, including diet, exercise, and symptom management.
Big pharma has no influence in the day-to-day privilege of caring for patients,

 

Yes it is not wise to label an entire group with one opinion or definition ..there are doctors who legit do care and went into the profession with good intention of healing and making the medical field a better place

 

I often say this and think I should put on a t-shirt as a slogan ....

Lobotomy’s went out years ago ...
for you I will make the exception

 

I often say this: “I would rather have a bottle in front of me, than a frontal lobotomy.”

 

I don't agree.

Even if a doctor is trying their best to give a patient the best care possible, they make decisions based on medical textbooks and other aspects of their medical education, medical research, and treatment guidelines. Those things are all too often manipulated. For example, medical ghost writing is common place, and such scientific medical fraud is commonly published in even reputable medical journals.

In the case of prescription opioids, often cited but flimsy medical research suggested that they could be prescribed widely without ill consequences. Medical texts even declared, "There's no such thing as prescribing too much opioid pain medication". The result was hundreds of thousands of people killed, and millions more turned into addicts. The opioid crisis was, imho, an entirely foreseeable and preventable epidemic created by pharmaceutical companies with the full cooperation of the medical establishment.

In cases where doctors have self-interests as their priority, speaking fees paid by pharmaceutical companies provide easy cover for kickback schemes. In the case of Insys (see the PBS Frontline documentary "Opioids, Inc."), doctors didn't even need to show up to events to collect speaking fees, and were paid with a formula where they could get a maximum of 50% of the dollar value of their prescriptions kicked back. Insys finally got busted, but the practice of pharma paying for "speaking fees" goes on.

 

Newbie, you paint the medical profession with a very wide and negative brush.
Hopefully someday a physician that takes care of you or a family member will result in a softening of your rhetoric and a development of your trust.