Lapham's Quarterly: Medicine
"Harrowing" is the word that most quickly comes to mind when describing the topic of medicine as presented in Lapham's Quarterly. Fanny Burney's "Mastectomy" (pp. 138-139, 1811, Paris) from the era before anesthesia, the abortion-gone-awry tale from John Barth's The End of the Road (pp. 75-78, 1953), and James Orbinski's eyewitness report of Rwandan butchery from An Imperfect Offering (pp. 112-114, 1994) combine with many of the issue's other featured writings to remind us of our good fortune to be living today rather than at any previous time--especially where the medical arts are concerned.
A selection from Trotula's twelfth-century Book on the Conditions of Women (p. 50, c. 1100) discussed menstruation and how it was thought to be affected by various imbalances of the humors; that it preceded an adjacent piece by Soranus (pp. 51-52, c. 120) by nearly a thousand years is astonishing given how little actual medicine separates their respective eras. The LQ editors note this explicitly, writing of Soranus that:
"His writings on contraceptive measures, podalic child delivery, and hygiene served as the basis for women's medicine for nearly one thousand years."
Later in the issue, the "Wandering Womb" prayer excerpt (p. 175, c. 950) is another example of the sort of ignorance which displaced knowledge for far too long:
"I conjure you, womb, by the Holy Trinity, that without any trouble you return to your place, and from there that you do not move or stray, that without anger you return to where God placed you."
Jonathan Lyon's "Early Islamic Medicine" (pp. 189-194) fingered Augustine as one of the villains in this centuries-long lacuna in the progress of medicine:
For six centuries the authoritative works of St. Augustine of Hippo had directed the Christian faithful to see only God's mystery in an otherwise unknowable world. Upon his conversion to Christianity in 387, Augustine set aside his once-lively interest in art and science ("Certainly the theaters no longer attract me, nor do I care to know the course of the stars.") and replaced it with superstition. Everyday existence was shrouded in allegorical meaning, while natural phenomena were seen--if they were seen at all--in the context of moralizing tales. [...] Disease was viewed as divine punishment for the sins of man, rather than as a condition to be addressed or ameliorated through human intervention.
The following essay, Meehan Crist's "Dissection," made a similar point when discussing the anatomy of the brain:
Only during the 1500s, when anatomists such as Andreas Vesalius finally turned back to the human body, putting aside for a moment the sheep and cats and pigs, did scientific understanding of the brain begin again to evolve.
One wonders: What would the state of medicine be if we hadn't blinded ourselves with faith for so long? If we had been learning from scientists instead of threatening them and burning them at the stake? If we had been reading their books rather than erasing them to write prayers?
One wonders...