Trick or Treatment? The Ghosts of Medicine Past
Imagine you’re sick. You have a fever. You’re weak, sweating, maybe delirious. Now imagine your doctor arrives. He doesn’t give you fluids. He doesn’t tell you to rest. He doesn’t open a window for fresh air.
Instead, he pulls out a lancet and opens a vein. He drains your blood until you faint—”if the strength of the patient will allow it, nothing is better in the Small-Pox than to bleed him till he faints,” as one 1848 medical text advised.
Then he gives you calomel—mercury—to purge your system. He wraps you in thick blankets in a sealed, overheated room. He gives you hot drinks and cordials to induce “profuse perspiration.”
You get worse.
The doctor bleeds you more. Gives you more mercury. More heat. More blankets.
You die.
And your death certificate says: “Smallpox.”
This wasn’t malpractice. This was the standard of care. This was what the best physicians of the era did, believing with absolute certainty that they were helping.
On Halloween, we dress up as monsters, ghouls, and goblins. We tell scary stories to make ourselves shiver. We revel in the thrill of being frightened by things we know aren’t real.
But what if I told you the scariest stories aren’t about vampires, zombies, or things that go bump in the night?
What if I told you the most terrifying tales are the ones that are true?
What if the real horror story is the one written in our medical textbooks, repeated by our doctors, enforced by our governments?
As one observer noted, Dr. Broady, author of Medical Practice without Poisons, described the various toxic combinations used by “the dominant school of medicine” of the time—over 100 medicines composed of “phosphorus, strychnine, mercury, opium, and arsenic.”
Dr. Beach noted in 1850 that “graveyards conceal the decaying remains of thousands killed by mercury.”
Dr. Dickson noted in 1861 that calomel was “one of the chief agents in man’s destruction!”
Russell Thacher Trall, MD, emphatically stated in 1860 that “mercury is a sheet-anchor in fevers; but it is an anchor that moors your patient to the grave.”
And Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., the celebrated Harvard physician, declared in the mid-1800s that “mankind has been drugged to death” by a “colossal system of self-deception.”
Continue reading “Challenging the Contagion-Only Model” →
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The Ghost of Edward Jenner
Let me tell you a story that begins, as all good fairy tales do, with “once upon a time.”
Once upon a time, in the late 18th century, a quiet country doctor in Gloucestershire, England, named Edward Jenner heard a rumor of a curious local belief: milkmaids who caught cowpox seemed never to fall ill with the dreaded smallpox.
Intrigued, Jenner decided to test this folk wisdom. In 1796, he took pus from a cowpox sore on the hand of a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes and deliberately inoculated a healthy eight-year-old boy, James Phipps, with the material. The boy developed a mild fever and some discomfort but recovered quickly. Weeks later, Jenner exposed young Phipps to matter taken from an active smallpox lesion.
To Jenner’s relief, James remained perfectly healthy.
Jenner concluded that cowpox not only protected against smallpox but did so with remarkable safety. He called his new method vaccination, from the Latin vacca for “cow.” His discovery spread slowly at first, met with some skepticism, but within a few years it transformed medicine, one of humanity’s greatest public health triumphs.
And we lived happily ever after.
Or did we?
Continue reading “The Vaccination Fairy Tale” →
image above:
Vaccination on the tenth day, showing a severe type of infection in a little child. Note wide-spread inflammation over the arm at the “areola” around the vaccine pustule and the bad eruption on the face which sometimes spreads all over the body. This is of course, a clear case of pus infection and septicemia in which lockjaw, meningitis, pneumonia, or other diseases may find their essential conditions for producing their deadly work in killing the child as a direct or indirect result of the vaccination and the double infection caused by it. — Chas M. Higgins, Horrors of Vaccination Exposed and Illustrated, 1920, p. 88.
The Ghost of a Century of Dissent
In 1889, after decades of mounting evidence that vaccination failed to protect against smallpox—and was actively causing injury and death—Parliament launched a Royal Commission to determine whether to maintain compulsory vaccination.
The Commission held 136 meetings and interviewed 187 witnesses over seven years before issuing its report in 1896.
What did they find?
The Commission acknowledged that “it is superfluous to cite further evidence… to prove, what is no longer denied by anybody, that small-pox attacks the vaccinated.” They admitted that “no witness who has appeared before us has maintained the original contention of Jenner.” Indeed, “the protection now claimed… is relative, not absolute; temporary and not permanent.”
They documented that erysipelas was “the most frequent of the ill results arising from or accompanying vaccination,” and that it “may terminate in death.” Between 1859 and 1880, there were 390 deaths in England and Wales “certified” as from “erysipelas after vaccination.”
They found that vaccine syphilis was a real danger, and that “vaccine lymph or the vaccine process is not unfrequently proximately related to erysipelas, inflamed arms, ulceration, sloughing, and axillary abscess.”
They discovered that vaccination’s protective power had never been demonstrated—that Woodville’s cases, which formed the foundation of the practice, “were from first to last, contaminated with small-pox,” and that “the whole of Woodville’s 500 cases… were in fact only a series of mild variolations [smallpox inoculation].”
And yet, the majority concluded that compulsory vaccination should continue.
The minority report, filed by Dr. William Job Collins and Mr. James Allanson Picton, dissented. They noted that “the great change of professional and scientific opinion since vaccination first engaged the attention of the Legislature… the prophylactic power of vaccination has been at least exaggerated, and that dangers incidental to the practice, though at one time denied, ‘are undoubtedly real and not inconsiderable in gross amount.’”
They argued that too little attention had been paid to “sanitary organization, prompt notification and isolation, measures of disinfection and cleanliness, and healthy conditions of living.”
They were outvoted.
But history would prove them right.
Continue reading “A Century of Dissent” →
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As Dr. Charles Creighton noted in 1889, “The history of vaccination from its beginning to its present position is a refreshing illustration of the truth that medical science is human first and scientific afterwards.”
In other words: ego, belief, profits, and fear of being ostracized played a pivotal role in keeping the idea of vaccination alive. The point is not merely that these human factors accompanied the science, but that they often substituted for it.
Ego drove practitioners to defend and champion a procedure they had personally staked their reputations on, making dispassionate reassessment of the evidence nearly impossible.
Belief—whether in the underlying theory of disease, in the authority of a mentor, or in the sheer momentum of an accepted practice—supplied conviction where controlled observation was absent.
Profits, both direct and institutional, ensured that those who benefited from vaccination had every incentive to promote it and to marginalize its critics.
And the fear of being ostracized kept dissenters silent or rendered them professionally radioactive once they spoke, so that challenges to the practice were dismissed as heresy rather than weighed as evidence.
This is the ghost story. This is the horror that haunts modern medicine.
And the only way to exorcise it is to see it clearly, to speak it plainly, and to refuse to be silent.
read the full article at romanbystrianyk.substack.com