AVIAN FLU, SOCIAL HISTORY AND
MEDICAL HISTORY.
Avian Flu, Social History and Medical History.
“Domesticated animals proved perennial and often
catastrophic sources of illness, for infectious disease riddled beasts
long before spreading to humans
.” [Porter, 16]
“Diseases like plague, malaria, yellow fever and
others with animal reservoirs are uniquely difficult to control
.”
[Porter, 25]
The more we ponder on it the clearer it seems that the
current bird flu saga raises a number of important conceptual issues
concerning any attempt we make to reconstruct the past and explain events.
This applies to any sphere but especially to so-called social history and
medical history. The reasons for this are quite complex but primarily
revolve about how we go about reconstructing the past as it actually was
and how we try to separate the real from the myriad false conceptual
projections we cast from the present upon the known facts about the past.
This essay attempts to delineate how we must approach any sound
reconstruction of the past, the major pitfalls we are prone to fall into,
the mass of unwarranted assumptions we are likely to carry with us in the
process and how we might begin to deal with them.
The past in so many ways can be better understood
through equipping ourselves with a deeper understanding of society today
and how human beings tend to behave. This provides us with an ability to
empathise more deeply with what is essentially an alien culture and to
acquire a predictive method. Not only is careful analysis of the present
the key to understanding the past, but we also need to become thoroughly
cognisant of the actual details of times past in order to make the
valuable type of interpretations historians crave. For example, in
considering times past we must try to very thoroughly reconstruct the
predominant conditions prevailing at the time; such a sentiment would seem
to be axiomatic. We also need to be cognisant of certain ‘constant aspects
of human nature,’ which apply in any time period. These anchor us to the
most probable motivations and explanations for events as they unfold.
Awareness of them very largely springs from our own life experience and
study of people in our life today. It is arguable that study of people and
society is vital as it invaluably and deeply enriches our understanding of
people in any time period.
A good example is the lack of hygiene before about 1850
and a general ignorance of those factors in society—such as wastes—that
might generate ill-health. Having untreated sewage flowing in streets and
rivers, piles of decaying rubbish lying about for long periods of time.
And the general prevalence of flies, rats, fleas and worms, all these have
been prevalent aspects of human life from the earliest times until
relatively modern times. Parasites like fleas were not as bad as we think:
“it sucked me first, and now sucks thee…in this flea our two
bloods mingled be…this flea’s death took life from thee.”
[Donne]
Being less prevalent today means we are likely to
ignore such aspects of everyday life when examining whatever time period
we wish to understand. In other words, in our attempt to go back into the
past we inadvertently carry with us the predominant attitudes and values
of the present, and the modern ‘conceptual tool-kit’ that goes with it,
which inevitably taint and distort our view. In our desire to try and see
the world as it really was, we also need to divest ourselves of the way
the present pervades our thinking and perception. Indeed, we cannot see
the past as it really was until we remove our modern-day ‘conceptual
spectacles.’ Unless we attempt to do this, then the so-called ‘past’ we
reconstruct will not be real and any evaluations we might make of it are
likely to be limited and misleading in their value.
As far as possible, we need to carefully reconstruct
life as it was actually lived by the people of the day. This is one of the
most central and difficult historical tasks, and we must constantly
reflect upon and carefully reconsider every aspect of a specific time
period and lifestyle in order to construct a more reliable and fully
rounded picture of life as it really was. This must involve eradicating
key elements of our modern life and thinking. Indeed that becomes a key
aspect of the main task.
Another good example concerns personal hygiene. Very
few people in the ‘rich countries,’ until the 1950s, cared a great deal
about their personal hygiene. Most people at that time washed and bathed
more or less when they felt like it, which in many cases was not that
often. Their clothes and bedding were changed and cleaned much less often
than today. People frequently wore the same clothes day after day without
washing, or slept in the same bed for weeks or months without changing the
sheets and pillow cases. These are crucial aspects of their daily lives
that we are apt to ignore or forget. Likewise with dental hygiene,
changing clothes, washing clothes and cleaning the house. These were
broadly neglected tasks, until the 1960s, when they first started to
become more important and far more widespread aspects of daily lives. For
some poor people, in rural areas and especially in many poor countries,
these facts still apply today. Yet even more crucially humans can live
like that with impunity for years and did so. We forget this and suppose
that they were dropping dead of numerous infections. The strong
possibility is that most of them weren’t.
Thus it was only in the 50s and 60s that hygiene
aspects of everyday life begin to shift towards modern habits a great deal
and begin to take on a more prominent role in people’s lives. Prior to
that point most people wore the same clothes for several days and did not
wash that often. Most people were also intimately associated with animals
to a degree that today is almost impossible to imagine. They were closely
associated with birds and pigs, dogs, cats and cattle as part of their
daily lives. In many homes, especially in rural areas, chickens ran around
freely in the house and kitchen and were not always barred from other
parts of many households. Likewise cats and dogs and in some cases pigs
and cows roamed freely about the place. This very intimate and
unquestioned association between people and their domesticated animals is
difficult for us today to imagine, but was so commonplace as to be
uncomment-worthy at the time. How dangerous was filth really? Suspicion
alone is not enough to prove this either way.
In the 16th century “some places were perceived
as being unhealthy for everyone.” [Wear, 188] Today we believe
that in such places “are various micro-organisms such as bacteria
and viruses which cause disease. But until the late 19th century, it was
believed that places and their associated airs and climates were
disease-making,” [Wear, 189] almost as an inherent aspect of
their existence. For example, “marshy, low-lying or enclosed land
with foggy, thick, damp and stagnant air was considered dangerous. Its air
filled with excremental humours.” [Wear, 191] Plague was believed
to be “caused by a poisonous air resulting from stagnant, stinking
and putrefying air coming from marshes, enclosed valleys, dunghills,
crowded rooms and other natural and man-made sources also contributed to
the suspicion of low-lying places.” [Wear, 191-2] There was a
widespread “perceived association between stinking air, foul
places and diseases such as plague.” [Wear, 314] It was very
widely believed that “filth, dunghills and stinking rubbish…may
breed infection.” [Wear, 315] Consequently, certain preventive
hygiene measures were introduced in many towns and cities such as “a
vigorous clean-up of the city.” [Wear, 316] People were “aware
that dirt was unpleasant and dangerous and should be avoided or expelled.”
[Wear, 316] This involved, for example, “sweeping of pavements and
to get rid of ‘nuisances’ such as dunghills and the animal remains from
slaughter-houses.” [Wear, 316]
In London, ‘scavengers’ and ‘rakers’ were employed to
keep the streets free of filth. Householders were periodically ordered to “flush
the channels running through the middle of the streets which were usually
full of foul refuse. In 1541 it was twelve bucketfuls three times a week;
by 1583 it had risen to at least twenty bucketfuls each morning before six
and another twenty after eight o’clock every evening.” [Wear,
317] England “was not a hygienic country in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries.” [Wear, 317] In developed countries today
we usually take for granted “that people’s everyday world is
relatively hygienic.” [Wear, 318] Hygiene “is now one of
the hidden programmes that shapes the developed world.” [Wear,
318] All “dirty foul airs and places were perceived as…sources
of danger needing to be cleaned up.” [318] Bad smells were
regarded as “pathological, corrupting life-giving air and when
breathed in, they damaged the inside of the body.” [Wear, 319]
All this obviously has some kind of impact upon the
health and type of sickness that was prominent, but it is hard to make any
hard and fast, definite or satisfactory judgements about that without
carrying into even the most recent past, those values and preconceptions
that originate only in the present. Such factors must have impacted upon
the immune systems of people in past centuries. Lack of basic hygiene and
close proximity for much of their life to filth of various kinds must have
enhanced their immune capacity and it is quite possible, for example, that
humans alive in those ages were not really medically comparable
to us humans alive today, who are clearly not exposed to anywhere like to
so many diverse bacteria or on such a scale as they were. This raises an
issue concerning causality in the realm of sickness that goes beyond
modern theories. It also raises questions about the strength of the human
immune system in varying conditions. Allergies in those days were
virtually unheard-of.
Another good example concerns the dead. Going further
back than the 1950s, and this applies in many ‘poor countries’ even today,
dead bodies must have been quite a common sight. Furthermore, scavenging
dogs and crows, for example, would find and attack dead corpses of all
kinds, whether human or animal. In past centuries, when corpses were quite
common, even those left hanging for months after executions, such events
must have been quite commonly experienced within the lives of most people,
especially in populous towns and cities. Dogs attack and feed on human
remains today in places like India and south-east Asia and doubtless also
in parts of Africa. This must have been a very common occurrence in Europe
in the past.
It would also especially be the case in times of
avalanches, floods, droughts, landslides, epidemics, heavy storms,
tornadoes, and other such natural calamities, when the ability of local
people to collect or retrieve and cremate/bury the dead was overstretched
or inadequate, such as would most likely happen in remote and
thinly-populated areas. In such situations, dogs would simply help
themselves to human remains without any interference or discouragement
from local people. Today we rarely see a dead person let alone dogs eating
one, and so our life experience tends to be very different from people
living a few hundred years ago. If you are used to seeing corpses hanging
about and human remains, dismembered people and acts of great violence,
then all of this has to have impacted on their values, attitudes and
beliefs.
Another important aspect of human life in past
centuries is that all people had fleas, lice and worms. Rats and mice were
also ubiquitous: “humans were often malnourished, parasite-riddled
and pestilence-smitten.” [Porter, 22] “I think this be
the most villanous house in all London road for fleas: I am stung like a
tench…and your chamber-lie breeds fleas like a loach.”
[Shakespeare]
Parasites were an integral part of everyone’s life.
That very few people [in rich countries] carry parasites today means we
are not able to fully empathise with the daily lives of our ancestors, and
we do not by any means successfully imagine ourselves into the life they
woke up to every single day. To what extent all these factors have
impacted on the health and sickness of the people in any epoch is again
quite difficult to evaluate. People lived lives much more integrated with
Nature, with the soil and plants and animals than we live today. Lacking
this perspective in our lives today inevitably generates many assumptions
we have about their lives and their sicknesses, but many of these
assumptions must be false if not at least highly questionable. As stated
at the start of this essay, in order to gain a better grasp of life as it
was lived centuries ago we must first divest ourselves of the encumbering
preconceptions and key elements of our present life. That is a difficult
but essential first step to gaining truly valuable insights about times
past. We must also cultivate our imagination sufficiently to penetrate
into the society of the present of which we are a part: one of the noblest
and gravest tasks of any historian.
We often do not know what cause is and what effect in
medicine is. Association is not causation, and mostly serves to generate
assumptions. We think we know this and we spread a web of assumptions
projected by us onto the world as we see it, but as indicated here, in
order to reach truly insightful views we must very largely divest
ourselves of these emburdening assumptions to reach the underlying truth.
We do not know that worms and fleas and lack of hygiene were the root
causes of many diseases in the past. It is actually an assumption we make.
“The tendency of the human mind to run after things visible, that
can be felt with the fingers, leads one to adopt foolish theories like the
Bacteria doctrine and the Molecular theory.” [Kent aphorims]
“I wonder if scientists reflect when they make
statements about bacteria. Naturally they would say that the more bacteria
the more danger, but this is not so.”
[Kent aphorims]
“Save the life of the patient first and don’t
worry about the bacteria. They are useless things.”
[Kent
aphorims]
“The Bacterium is an innocent feller, and if he
carries disease he carries the Simple Substance which causes disease, just
as an elephant would
.” [Kent aphorims]
We do not know what it is like to eat ‘unhygienic’ food
everyday and share our lives side-by-side with animals. We do not really
know what it is like to drink filthy water every day and have human wastes
piled up near our living place. We do not know how the immune system copes
with such unsanitary conditions. How it becomes strengthened for example.
We today do not really know what human life was like
with rats and mice scuttling about all over the place and chickens and
dogs living intimately with human beings, and wastes lying around in heaps
and eating unhygienic food and drink. We have no commonality of such
experiences and so we must imagine ourselves into such life situations as
best as we can. Even laying aside our strong prejudices, we do not really
know whether such a lifestyle predominantly brings health and happiness or
disease and misery, all the time or sometimes, for everyone or just for
some. We think we know these things, but in actuality we have no idea how
the delicate balance between health and disease actually functions in such
conditions, and until we utilise the historical imagination and enter into
this world richly and deeply as it actually was, then we shall never know
these things. We shall never know such things, even though we carry with
us a nexus of assumptions and preconceptions about how we think it ‘MUST’
have been. To know the truth must be the historians’ primary task. Why
then do we cling doggedly on to these absurd assumptions?
When we look at bird flu today we are faced with a
similar controversy about the nature of social life and how to separate
the real causes of sickness from the assumed causes. We see
diseases allegedly coming from the East and becoming epidemics in Europe.
To what extent these diseases truly originate in the east and follow a
westwards route and to what extent they are as described is an open
question. In order to better understand them, we must recreate the past as
it was lived not as it was described in textbooks by people who have never
travelled to those times in fact-enhanced imagination. Even in the case of
major historical epidemics such as Bubonic plague and Influenza, the
notion that this sickness was coming from the east along trade routes to a
clean and uncontaminated Europe is a false one. Europe at that time was by
no means a clean and uncontaminated place! It was just as fly, flea and
rat infested as any place along those trade routes. The conditions were
just as unhygienic, filthy and repulsive by modern standards as they were
anywhere else. Therefore, we must be objective and face up to any
unwarranted assumptions that taint the view we are painting.
We must look first to the primary balanced condition of
man in order to understand the true meaning of health and sickness, not to
his condition today which is far removed from that state. The primary or
natural state of man was this close and largely harmonious association
with animals, filth and the soil, which goes far deeper than is ever
imagined by us today. This is the primary or natural state of man, just as
it is the natural state of animals and plants…not in some sanitised,
detached and notionally ‘hygienic’ state, where the balance between all
the component parts, which existed so sweetly, has been disrupted and
broken. In nature, for any animal or plant, there is a natural state of
harmony with all its neighbours and associated organisms.
Food and diet must have had a very important bearing on
the health and sickness of people in times past. What we eat and its
quality and amount has a direct bearing on our state of well being, both
mentally and physically. Excess is always worse than undernourishment and
the ancients knew this very well. This is why regimen and restraint and
fasting were such integral parts of all medical treatments even into the
19th century. Fasting, purging, emesis and temperance were the watchwords
of all medical practice. It was well known empirically that emptying the
bowels of wastes, and the entire digestive tract of food material, was a
sure way to swiftly subdue the severity of any sickness. It also follows
that much sickness was caused by overindulgence and plethora. This notion
justifies not only purging and fasting but also bleeding as a successful
form of medical intervention respected for centuries. Moderation in eating
and strict regimen have long been recognised as the cornerstones of good
health and longevity.
Diet and disease also brings with it the whole
relationship between what we take into our bodies and the possible effects
and imbalances that might generate. Today medicine has become overly
obsessed with bacteria and viruses as if they are the root causes of all
sickness, which is not the case and never has been. So much medical
thinking is focused upon such alleged causes as infective particles, that
pure empirical observation of the patient is not undertaken very
thoroughly any more. Sickness is always a manifestation of an imbalance in
the life and being of the person, and is not primarily the symptoms but a
deeper underlying pattern of unhappiness or disruption. This reveals that
the deeper patterns of imbalance within a person’s life can be addressed
and sickness abate or disappear completely.
There is no doubt that in past ages physical injuries,
and one thinks especially of deep wounds and fractures, would have
rendered people immobile for weeks on end, and in some cases death was
inevitable even with good care from relatives and neighbours. Broken limbs
require rest to heal properly and in some circumstances such rest was not
possible. There is also no doubt that suppurating wounds, tooth abscesses
and such like would have been almost fatal in many cases simply due to
ineffective means of treatment.
Another important factor is fellowship…all animals
like fellowship with their own kind and man is no exception. We need close
proximity to each other and things go wrong when we lose this key aspect
in our lives or societies, when we somehow become alienated from the herd.
Fish have a visual and tactile field of fellowship, insects, like dogs,
have a chemical or olfactory field of fellowship [as well as sound in some
cases] and plants seem to have a tactile and chemical field of fellowship
with one another through their roots and leaves. Many mammals and birds
have tactile, olfactory and sound forms of fellowship and communication.
Only when these fields become disrupted and broken do problems arise.
Disease can be depicted as a loss of love or social cohesion and that idea
is a very fruitful one.
We are wrong to project onto the living world our own
desire for tidy, clean and sanitised relationships between organisms, and
to do this is to try and impose an unnatural order on things. That is not
the way things are; it is not the primary state of affairs. Man has become
progressively detached from the natural world in the last millennium or
so, and it is this detachment which might have engendered the deep
imbalances in our relationships with other organisms, including bacteria
and viruses…imbalances that do not and did not exist in the primary
condition of man. These outer imbalances have created in turn internal
imbalances which favour sickness over health. It was these previously
delicate balances that enabled our ancestors to live healthily in spite of
what appear to us to be very tough prevailing conditions. It is these
delicate associations with fleas, worms and the soil, with ‘filth’ to some
degree, which enabled their immune systems [their vital processes] to be
so strong and to resist diseases. Manifestly, there was therefore less
sickness then than today. Hard to believe, but almost certainly true.
People in all previous times were much tougher than we are today, much
hardier and used to hard physical work and long hours.
In ancient times, doctors believed that “disease
comes about…through an excess of heat or cold…a surfeit or lack of
nutriment…from external causes…overwork, hardship,” [Nutton,
47] etc. Equally, “what preserves health is the equal distribution
of [the body’s]…forces,” [Nutton, 47] or the “harmonious
blending of qualities.” [Nutton, 47] Health then “depends
on a balanced mixture…[and] a complete blending together of all the
body’s forces.” [Nutton, 47-8] Throughout the medieval period
also there was a predominant “belief that good health involved an
equilibrium,” [Bullough, 191] and that sickness represented
“a body out of balance.” [Bullough, 191] The aim of
medical treatment was thus always “to establish the proper
equilibrium,” [Bullough, 191] and so to restore harmony to the
body’s functions. Treatments were designed to “get the body in
balance.” [Bullough, 192] Given that “the sick body is in
some way out of balance, it must be brought back into balance either by
removing whatever is in excess or by building up whatever is
deficient.” [Nutton, 97] Such a sentiment has clearly underpinned
medicine for centuries and seems inherent to it. The medieval physicians
believed that “the welfare of the soul was dependent upon the
proper mixture of the humours.” [Debus, 20]
The root cause of all sickness is an internal imbalance
which does not flow from any of the external conditions of a man’s life.
It flows from within and is primarily an internal derangement of the vital
processes [susceptibility] and the body’s innate capacity to live
comfortably with those external conditions. Once this capacity is weakened
by some inner disorder, then sickness repeatedly makes its appearance and
may become chronically imbedded. We should not look to the outer condition
of man for the causes of sickness, but internally for the root causes. In
normal good health we live in complete harmony with prevailing conditions.
It is only when we become sick that we can see that this harmony has been
compromised, broken down and actually precedes and underpins the sickness
state. There is an internal change that precedes the descent into
sickness. Thus, healing always means to restore this internal state of
balance. “The microbe is not the cause of disease. We should not
be carried away by these idle Allopathic dreams and vain imaginations but
should correct the Vital Force.” [Kent aphorims]
Therefore, we can see that the reductionist and
fragmentalist view science takes of the world, has ‘polluted’ medical
thinking sufficiently to leave people today unable to fully comprehend the
empirical nature of sickness and health in their original state…man
today has detached himself from the soil and parasites to such a degree
that he is in an innately imbalanced state with his surroundings and so
un-health, dis-ease is rampant and he is wide open to diseases that never
existed before and also his susceptibility has grown in direct proportion
to the decline of his intimate engagement with the pristine world of
nature, that is his primary condition. Science has encouraged our
severance from the natural world and so we lack holism, we lack the deep
connectedness with Nature that we need in order to live happily,
contentedly and healthily.
When Porter states that “our ‘primitive’
ancestors were thus practically free of the pestilence that ambushed their
‘civilised’ successors and have plagued us ever since…together with
dangers, injuries and hardships, there were ailments to which they were
susceptible,” [Porter, 16] he is wrong. And maybe he assumes too
much. He also says: “soil-borne anaerobic bacteria penetrated
through skin wounds to produce gangrene and botulism; anthrax and rabies
were picked up from animal predators like wolves…game would have
transmitted the microbes of relapsing fever…brucellosis and haemorrhagic
fevers. Other threats came from organisms co-evolving with humans,
including tapeworms, such bacteria as Treponema, the agent of syphilis,
and the similar skin infection, yaws.” [Porter, 16-17] This is to
view the past solely through the eyes of a modern scientist and is
irrational fantasy.
And further that “permanent settlement afforded
golden opportunities for insects, vermin and parasites.” [Porter,
19] “the scales of health tipped unfavourably, with infections
worsening and human vitality declining.” [Porter, 19] Why? When
he says, “vermin learned to cohabit with humans, insects spread
gastroenteric disorders, and contact with rodents led to human…diseases
like typhus,” [Porter, 21] then this is not true, as so-called
vermin was there from the start. Man got caught up in “a disease
net involving rats, fleas, and the plague bacillus.” [Porter, 25]
And when Porter says, “domesticated animals proved perennial and
often catastrophic sources of illness, for infectious disease riddled
beasts long before spreading to humans,” [Porter, 16] they did
not and are not sources of illness. This again is fantasy. He does not
wish to elucidate the primary condition of man, and nor is he concerned
with the harmonious association man must inevitably have had with filth,
domesticated animals and with parasites for many millennia before
imbalances appeared. In which case, does this not all represent the most
reprehensible and wholly unjustified form of bacteriological imperialism.
These are dogmas being taken into the past to ‘explain’ things, or even to
imagine things that never actually happened. And is it not an unproven
catalogue of errors deriving from a dogmatic breed of scientific
reductionism utterly oblivious to social realities?
How is it really credible that in his primary state man
lived in harmony with filth, animals and parasites for millennia and then
suddenly for these natural factors to be invoked as the root causes of all
sickness? It is illogical and inconsistent with the primary state of man.
As Kent says, it is really an “idle allopathic dream,” to credit
such ideas with any genuine historical or medical value.
Conclusion
It is clearly very hard for us today to come to any
certain knowledge about the past, and the further back we go the harder
this becomes. We should always exercise great caution in making any
interpretations of events in past ages. We should first purge ourselves of
all modern concepts and views, preconceptions and habits of mind. We must
strive very strictly to view the past as it actually was, not as we think
it might have been. We must not reach for hasty decisions about the root
causes of sickness in any age. The truth often requires long reflection
and the tedious collection of data. Man’s integration with Nature was
his primary condition, a state we today have strayed from by a very wide
margin. It requires a special leap of the imagination to realistically
place oneself back into the medieval or any more distant epoch.
Science, with its fragmentalist approach, is a deeply
flawed historical tool, it is the “narrowness of causal approach,”
[Guttentag, 1186] which blinds more than it illuminates about past ages.
Burdened with a heavy cargo of assumptions, it tells us little about the
daily lives of human beings centuries ago, and yet it is in the daily
lives of people that the causes of their sufferings lay hidden. The
historian’s task is to reach into any epoch and successfully reconstruct
its zeitgeist, its essential features. It is an act of empathy and
imagination as much—if not more than—one about facts and figures,
names, dates and places. The historian is aided by knowledge of people
today and the constants in human life of any age.
So-called bird flu has arisen in a place where there is
still today an intimate and largely harmonious association between man and
animals, but that is man’s primary or natural state and the number of
cases is minute compared to the huge numbers of people living in that
intimate association. What needs to be investigated is the health status
of that tiny minority of individuals who have succumbed to this sickness,
which would presumably reveal the underlying internal imbalance that led
to their susceptibility to a virus completely harmless to the millions of
other people around them, who are also living in intimate association with
animals, but for whom the virus has done nothing. Then something of value
might finally emerge from the whole sorry episode.
Another key aspect concerns the similarity between
medieval societies in general and the social life found in ‘poor’
countries today. Because in his primary state—as in most poor countries
today—man lived in intimate contact with animals, wastes, excrement and
parasites—arguably to which he is innately very well adapted—so, his
general condition of health is much different from and so not very
comparable with that of modern western man in so-called ‘advanced’
societies or ‘rich’ countries, where there is only minimal such
exposure to pathogens and where man exists much more distant from his ‘natural
state.’ Therefore, one can argue for the strong possibility that the
health and sickness ‘rules’ that we derive from the study of modern
man are not necessarily applicable in the far tougher and more resistant
breed of people who lived in medieval times or in the ‘poor’ countries
today. They were much tougher people and more resilient to germs than we
are today or in the west. Therefore, in all likelihood it is inappropriate
to transfer those concepts of health and disease from modern ‘sterile’
societies in rich countries to people in times past or in poor countries,
as the two groups of humans are radically different in health and sickness
terms. This is a powerful argument against that ingrained allopathic and
reductionistic habit of treating all people as a global, homogeneous and
undifferentiated mass, which they clearly are not.
Therefore in a sense, “the invading organism is
not any longer considered to be the cause of the disease.”
[Guttentag, 1186] For, “the carrier who harbours the parasite but
does not suffer from the disease reveals…the lack of justification for
characterising the invading parasite as the cause.” [Guttentag,
1186] We must consider “the qualitatively and quantitatively
different reaction of different individuals towards the same,”
[Guttentag, 1186] disease, and engineer treatments for the patient, not
the so-called ‘disease.’ Of paramount importance is “the
differing seriousness of an epidemic among its different victims.”
[Guttentag, 1186] Fact is that “the reactivity of the organism,
its constitution, is as important as the encountered specific external
factor,” [Guttentag, 1186] that triggers the sickness in any
individual, such as the alleged germ.
Sources
Vern L Bullough, Universities, Medicine and Science in
the Medieval West, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2004
Allen G Debus, The Chemical Philosophy, Paracelsian
Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, New York:
Dover, 1977
John Donne, The Flea, poem, c.1600
http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/flea.htm
Otto E Guttentag, Trends toward Homeopathy Present and
Past, Bull Hist Med, 8.8, 1940, 1172-1193
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