Subversive Health

Florence Nightingale came to the horrors of the Crimean War demanding radical things like soap and water and fresh air. The doctors, she said, would burn me like Joan of Arc, if they could.

That response to another paradigm is still pretty much the same today. Some brave doctors talk today about EVIDENCE based medicine. But, the Medical Establishment maintains the right to BAR doctors who dare to disagree with “the correct” practices.

Sigh. Rigidity of thought is compounded when we humans would have to acknowledge that we had unwittingly harmed another. This is part of why the doctors — who never thought of washing their hands when going from dissecting people to delivering babies — turned on Dr. Semmelweis. He pointed out that washing their hands might reduce the number of women dying from childbed fever. He was put in an insane asylum.

This is a fairly typical response. In WW I the officers who came back from the horrors of trench warfare and said it had to stop — were sent to insane asylums. I think now we talk about “tinfoil hat” wearers.

Changing mental maps is difficult at best. New scientific paradigms take time . . . and the dying off of the old defenders. Then, they too will be replaced. THAT is science. Continual questioning and challenging.