On Google or in books, you will often find bloodletting, taking blood from sick people, as “medieval medicine.”
It was just the opposite.
The whole absurd theory of “balancing humors,” of which taking QUARTS of blood out of George Washington when he was dying of pneumonia, was an integral part of what would be called the Renaissance. This was when Europe dumped all the “Medieval” stuff and read the Classical authors of ancient Rome and Greece and became truly civilized.
In fact, bleeding came out of those Classical books. It was THE Classical form of medicine, developed at the height of what the Renaissance would call classical science, the second century AD.
Nobody in the days before Classical learning would have thought you were anything but insane to be taking blood OUT of a sick person.
I have quoted in these annals from the chief physician to Louis XIV, who survived to age 77 despite his doctors. This Great Intellectual denounced all the doctors who said that syphilis was the result of “tiny, unseen animals in the blood that multiply…,” in other words as good an explanation of the bacteriological theory of medicine as could be made at the time, before microscopes came out of the Netherlands.
The outraged Mommy Professor who is chief physician to the Sun King sounds very familiar. He roars that these theories do not cite a single “Authority.” He has a huge list of German names, all of whom were apparently well known at the time for describing bacteriological disease.
Actually, the Renaissance horse shit is an exact parallel to what we have today. Washington died because doctors still read Latin and used Galen. What they did NOT use was the common sense medicine of the REAL Middle Ages.
In fact, the one example we have of this was Paracelsus, whose cures for battle wound were little short of miraculous in his day. But all his life he was accused of being deficient in Latin. Paracelsus followed his EXPERIENCE with battle wounds and actual survivals rather than quoting Greek Authorities who never saw a bullet wound or even a crossbow wound or serious shrapnel.
So Mommy Professors agreed that he CURE for what was actually the Mommy Professor Complex was MORE Mommy Professor Complex.
Sound familiar?
#1 by BGLass on 04/13/2012 - 10:36 am
Made me think of Father Francis on SF radio going on about how “there’s no one in history who’s had it worse than the Irish.” No doubt true– but blacks, hispanics, gays, feminism freaks, etc. might argue it.
Still– the statement itself (who is most oppressed?) is very MARXIST, in its own right. In other words —like bleeding—the prevailing ideology of an age runs deep— even in those who profess to be against it.
But to be oppressed is a value in Marxism, only. You get things for it.
In reality, everyone is oppressed—can make a strong case for being crapped on— but if they’re NOT a Marxist, they would not even THINK to mention how crapped on they are— because it would mean nothing and get them no brownie points.
Like the Weakest Generation value that they “can take it.” Ie: being beaten to a pulp shows their great toughness. But if you were so great— why weren’t you smart enough not to get beaten to a pulp? In REALITY, they starved the population for a generation before the “great” war (in what they called “the depression”) which is the only reason people joined the army, probably. Army was their only job hope.
It hurts to think you were so beaten down that you could only join an army, wear a uni-form (literally one form; cease to have individuality, which would be more human)— so they cover it up and say it was heroic.
Oppression is a great value in Marxism. Being beaten up. It is almost impossible to “get outside” these “values” of the anti-white PC rhetoric, so deep it goes. The two sentences of the Bible that might be interpreted to support that are said over and over and over, as if the book says nothing else.
Daddy always put it: You can’t get outside what you’re born in. The prevailing wisdom of any age runs deep. To think you can be outside a system, above it, in ANY OTHER RELATION to it than to be formulated by it (which you are) is the worst form of hubris. You can’t be “in it but not of it”— you are “of it,” and the only way to get beyond it is to first have that basic understanding. Mr. Whitaker puts it: ‘outgrow your education.’ You can’t just disavow it, say it meant nothing; that means you pretend it was of no consequence, which is not true
People who did not bleed others probably felt really really guilty, all the while KNOWING it was deadly, guilty even as they saved lives.
Overcoming conditioning —the seeming “naturalness” of the ideas of the age— takes constant mental rigor, and even at that, one might not get very far.
Many never even hear the principle of the thing, stated above. That there IS a prevailing age, very normalized/ naturalized that they simply assume, but that can be questioned.
#2 by Gavin on 04/13/2012 - 12:57 pm
Some think that you have to engage on the establishment’s terms in order to engage at all. Some cannot even fathom it being any other way. Morality and entitlement by virtue of being the most sad sack loser IS the proper and natural order of things in their mind.
You can never win by appealing to Mommy Professor “look I am a sad and pathetic person too!” Developing a personal outlook and making statements based on your own outlook rather than trying to fit your agenda into someone else’s outlook is something I have found gets me a good response from others.
#3 by Dave on 04/13/2012 - 11:13 am
Why is Mommy Professor so stupid? The answer is simple: She doesn’t HAVE to be anything else.
#4 by backbaygrouch on 04/13/2012 - 11:25 am
The physician Bob cites, Charles de Lorme, lived into his nineties. He was an enterprising Harley Street type doctor with a successful sideline of nostrums. As a young man he was very scientific and devised an add-on to the beaks that doctors wore when treating contagious diseases. To maintain the classical theory of humours he went head to toe. If you want the full story go to wikipedia and search: Plague doctor’s costume. It is an I-don’t-make-this-stuff-up entry. But Mommy Professor does make things up to maintain any number of absurdities.
#5 by ANOTHERWHITERABBIT on 04/13/2012 - 1:25 pm
sounds very familiar in short you’ve said “you’re not talking to your docter you’re are talking to his lawyer”
#6 by Gavin on 04/13/2012 - 2:49 pm
When you first get into a subject you look for who has THE ANSWERS.
THE MAN with THE ANSWERS becomes the infallible authority. It’s easy to just trust that he knows what he says. When you don’t know yourself you just assume that someone does.
If he is SURE of what he says and denounces other opinions as stupid you feel safe in taking on his attitude on faith even if you haven’t done the thoughts or experience yourself.