Medicine for Dummies

The best part of being a professional Research Editor (and if you don't capitalize that you're shit out of luck if you expect a response email) and knowing shitloads about history is that you get to spend most of your time laughing at how stupid people were in the past. Which is even more fun than it sounds. Not that people are any smarter now, but the true scope of any period's idiocy only becomes vividly clear in retrospect.

Most people don't know, for example, that back when X-rays were invented they weren't used for any breakthrough life-saving medical purposes. They used them to X-ray people's feet in shoe stores to make sure their shoes fit right. I shit you not. And it wasn't until the store employees started growing dicks on their dicks like weird sex-cactus nightmares and other Stephen King nonsense that they put two and two together and figured out that all the store employees should run and hide behind a felt tarp when the Foot-o-Scope was turned on. Years later somebody realized that there was a reason all the regular customers were having their feet turn to chalk, so the shoe stores sold all their Foot-o-Scopes to hospitals, which began using them to X-ray pregnant women daily to make sure their fetuses were turning out okay.

Foot-o-Scopes were outlawed by the 1950's, though some were still found to be in use in West Virginia and other third-world states well into the 1980's. Shocking as this may seem, it is important to remember that the state of West Virginia is officially 100 years behind the times, and is kept that way by the federal government to encourage tourism. It's like a giant state-sized Truman Show. The reason there are so many UFO sightings in West Virginia is that the state's residents have not yet invented the aeroplane, and commercial flights passing over the state scare the bejesus out of everyone on the ground.

However, this is an exciting time to be a West Virginian, since the early 1900's were the golden age of misguided medical innovation. Only now are West Virginians experiencing the joys of phrenology, the science of determining personality by measuring the size of your head. Phrenologists used head-measuring devices that look like what you'd use to measure someone's head if you only had a vegetable colander and an acupuncture set at your disposal. It was thought at the time that different parts of the brain controlled different organs, and it went without saying that each of these organs controlled a personality trait (hence the terms "That guy was a dick," "What an asshole," and "Just tackle the wolf, you pussy!"). So if the subject being measured had a lump on his skull in a certain spot, obviously his brain was so overdeveloped in that area it was pushing his skull out like a baking potato.

This theory was soon followed to its logical conclusion when medical marvel and part-time turkey hunter James "Lumpy" Monroe was named President for Life and God Among Men of the National Phrenology Association for his freakishly cauliflower-like skull. This crowning achievement of the phrenology movement was short-lived, however, and the practice was dealt a crippling blow soon after his election when Lumpy Monroe drown while attempting to quench his thirst by leaving his mouth open in a rainstorm.

Part of the reason phrenology proved so popular in the early 20th century was that people had just figured out that bloodletting was bullshit and were eager to find something new to spend their healthcare dollars on, since back in that day all doctors could really do was take your pulse and give you "pills." I say "pills" because all prescription drugs were the same thing back then, capsules containing a mixture of cocaine, morphine and alcohol that were put into different bottles depending on what your problem was. The pills didn't actually cure anything, but nobody complained since they were drunk and high all the time.

Believe it or not, this was actually a step forward for Western medicine, since previously people had believed that the only way to get well was to get the sick out of your body by whatever means necessary. From the middle ages through the 1800's, doctors starved, bled and beat the shit out of sick people both for the patient's health and for their own personal enjoyment. And though the starving and the ass-kicking were the most fun for the doctors, bloodletting was by far the most popular cure for everything from abdominal cramps to bad luck.

Doctors and barbers both got in on the act, though the latter was more a serendipitous accident involving poorly-trained barbers. The barbers had a leg up on the doctors when it came to marketing, however, and they came up with the barber pole to make blood draining out of an arm look fun, while all the doctors could come up with was a couple of scary-assed snakes humping a light pole, which probably drove away more customers than it attracted.

Doctors coined the term "phlebotomy" for the practice, combining "phlegm," the scientific term for throat snot, with "botomy," the medical term meaning the removal of an important body part for no good reason. Phlebotomy flourished despite the fact that a doctor killed George Washington by leaving the former president draining while he went away for a weekend of golf. The American Civil War marked the height of the craze, when over 500,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were cured of aggressive tendencies through battlefield phlebotomy.

The annals of medical dumbshitery are much thicker than could ever be covered in one column, but rest assured this topic will be revisited the next time I have to go see my idiot doctor.

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