Disease 1

 

Quack doctor

Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.

— Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797).

 

In letting of blood, three main circumstances are to be considered, who, how much, when?
— Robert Burton (1577-1640), Anatomy of Melancholy.

 

Burton, who believed in judicial astrology, is said to have foretold, from a calculation of his nativity, the time of his death; which occurred at the period he predicted, but not without some suspicion of his having occasioned it by his own hand.
— Robert Chambers, Cyclopaedia of English Literature, Edinburgh, 1844, pages 273-274.

 

To this, as I said before, the astrologers added stories of the conjunctions of planets in a malignant manner and with a mischievous influence, one of which conjunctions was to happen, and did happen, in October, and the other in November; and they filled the people’s heads with predictions on these signs of the heavens, intimating that these conjunctions foretold drought, famine and pestilence. In the two first of them, however, they were entirely mistaken, for we had no droughty season …
— Daniel Defoe (1660 – 1731) A Journal of the Plague Year, 1722, Everyman edition 27.

 

‘Tis sufficient from these to apprise any one of the humour of those times, and how a set of thieves and pickpockets not only robbed and cheated the poor people of their money, but poisoned their bodies with odious and fatal preparations; some with mercury, and some with other things as bad, perfectly remote from the thing pretended to, and rather hurtful than serviceable to the body in case an infection followed.
— Daniel Defoe (1660 – 1731) A Journal of the Plague Year, 1722, Everyman edition 35.

 

Here also I ought to leave a further remark for the use of posterity, concerning the manner of people’s infecting one another; namely, that it was not the sick people only from whom the plague was immediately received by others that were sound, but the well. To explain myself, by the sick people I mean those who were known to be sick, had taken their beds, had been under cure, or had tumours and swellings upon them, and the like; these everybody could beware of; they were either in their beds or in such condition as could not be concealed. By the well I mean such as had received the contagion, and had it really upon them, and in their blood, yet did not show the consequences of it in their countenances; nay, even were not sensible of it themselves, as many were not for several days. These breathed death in every place, and upon everybody who came near them; nay, their very clothes retained the infection, their hands would infect the things they touched, especially if they were warm and sweaty, and they were generally apt to sweat too.
— Daniel Defoe (1660 – 1731) A Journal of the Plague Year, 1722, Everyman edition pp. 215-216.

 

It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard, in ordinary discourse, that the plague was returned again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the year 1663, whither, they say, it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant, among some goods which were brought home by their Turkey fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus.
— Daniel Defoe (1660 – 1731), A Journal of the Plague Year, first published 1722.

 

The fire, which consumed what the plague could not touch, defied all the application of remedies; the fire-engines were broken, the buckets thrown away, and the power of man was baffled and brought to an end. So the plague defied all medicines; the very physicians were seized with it, with their preservatives in their mouths; and men went about prescribing to others and telling them what to do, until the tokens were upon them, and they dropped down dead, destroyed by that very enemy they directed others to oppose.
— Daniel Defoe (1660 – 1731) A Journal of the Plague Year, 1722, Everyman edition 39 – 40.

 

This put it out of question to me, that the calamity was spread by infection; that is to say, by some certain steams or fumes, which the physicians call effluvia, by the breath, or by the sweat, or by the stench of the sores of the sick persons, or some other way, perhaps, beyond even the reach of the physicians themselves, which effluvia affected the sound who came within certain distances of the sick, immediately penetrating the vital parts of the said sound persons, putting their blood into an immediate ferment, and agitating their spirits to that degree which it was found they were agitated; and so those newly infected persons communicated it in the same manner to others.
— Daniel Defoe (1660 – 1731) A Journal of the Plague Year, 1722, Everyman edition 84.

 

He [a grave-digger] never used any preservative against the infection, other than holding garlic and rue in his mouth, and smoking tobacco … And his wife’s remedy was washing her head in vinegar, and sprinkling her head-clothes so with vinegar as to keep them always moist; and if the smell of any she waited on was more than ordinary offensive, she snuffed vinegar up her nose and sprinkled vinegar upon her head-clothes, and held a handkerchief wetted with vinegar to her mouth.
— Daniel Defoe (1660 – 1731) A Journal of the Plague Year, 1722, Everyman edition 101.

 

The country people would go and dig a hole at a distance from them, and then with long poles, and hooks at the end of them, drag these bodies into these pits, and then throw the earth in from as far as they could cast it, to cover them, taking notice how the wind blew, and so coming on that side which the seamen call to windward, that the scent of the bodies might blow from them…
— Daniel Defoe (1660 – 1731) A Journal of the Plague Year, 1722, Everyman edition 113.

 

Wherefore we were ordered to kill all the dogs and cats … I think they talked of forty thousand dogs, and five times as many cats, few houses being without a cat, some having several, sometimes five or six in a house. All possible endeavours were used, also, to destroy the mice and rats, especially the latter, by laying ratsbane and other poisons for them, and a prodigious multitude of them were also destroyed.
— Daniel Defoe (1660 – 1731) A Journal of the Plague Year, 1722, Everyman edition 137.

 So long as the body is affected through the mind, no audacious device, even of the most manifestly dishonest character, can fail of producing occasional good to those who yield it an implicit or even partial faith.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809 – 1894), ‘Homeopathy and its kindred delusions’ in Medical Essays.

 

Asthma is a disease that has practically the same symptoms as passion except that with asthma it lasts longer.
— Anonymous, quoted in the Collins Dictionary of Medical Quotations.

 

Of old when folk lay sick and sorely tried
The doctors gave them physic and they died.
But here’s a happier age: for now we know
Both how to make men sick and keep them so.
— Hilaire Belloc (1870 – 1953), ‘On Hygiene’ in Stories Essays and Poems, Everyman Library 948, 1957, 414.

 

He that sinneth before his Maker, let him fall into the hands of the physician.
— Apocrypha: Ecclesiasticus, 38:15.

 

At sixty-five Smith was taken ill, and, receiving proper treatment, he died.
— Stephen Leacock (1869 – 1944), Literary Lapses (1910).

 

A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.
— Frank Lloyd Wright (1867 – 1959).

 

I wish I had the voice of Homer,
To sing of rectal carcinoma
Which kills a lot more chaps in fact,
Than were bumped off when Troy was sacked.
Yet, thanks to modern surgeon’s skills,
It can be killed before it kills
Upon a scientific basis
In nineteen out of twenty cases.
I noticed I was passing blood
(Only a few drops, not a flood).
So pausing on my homeward way
From Tallahassee to Bombay
I asked a doctor, now my friend,
To peer into my hinder end,
To prove or to disprove the rumour
That I had a malignant tumour.
They pumped in BaSO₄
Till I could really stand no more,
And, when sufficient had been pressed in,
They photographed my large intestine,
In order to decide the issue
They next scraped out some bits of tissue.
(Before they did so, some good pal
Had knocked me out with pentothal,
Whose action is extremely quick,
And does not leave me feeling sick.)
The microscope returned the answer
That I had certainly got cancer.
So I was wheeled into the theatre
Where holes were made to make me better.
One set is in my perineum
Where I can feel, but can’t yet see ‘em.
Another made me like a kipper
Or female prey of Jack the Ripper.
Through this incision, I don’t doubt,
The neoplasm was taken out,
Along with the colon, and lymph nodes
Where cancer cells might find abodes.
A third much smaller hole is meant
To function as a ventral vent:
So now I am like two-faced Janus
The only* god who sees his anus.
I’ll swear without the risk of perjury,
It was a snappy bit of surgery.
My rectum is a serious loss to me,
But I’ve a very neat colostomy,
And hope, as soon as I am able,
To make it keep a fixed time-table
So do not wait for aches or pains
To have a surgeon mend your drains;
If he says ‘cancer’ you’re a dunce
Unless you have it out at once,
For if you wait, it’s sure to swell,
And may have progeny as well.
My final word, before I’m done,
Is ‘Cancer can be rather fun’.
Thanks to the nurses and Nye Bevan
The NHS is quite like heaven
Provided one confronts the tumour
With a sufficient sense of humour.
I know that cancer often kills,
But so do cars and sleeping pills;
And it can hurt one till one sweats,
So can bad teeth and unpaid debts.
A spot of laughter, I am sure,
Often accelerates one’s cure;
So let us patients do our bit
To help the surgeons make us fit.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
* In India there are several more
With extra faces, up to four,
But both in Brahma and in Shiva
I own myself an unbeliever.
— J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964), quoted by Ronald Clark in J. B. S. : The Life and Work of J. B. S. Haldane, 1968, 257-258 (lines five to eight were added later by Haldane).

 

Infectious disease is one of the great tragedies of living things — the struggle for existence between different forms of life. Man sees it from his own prejudiced point of view; but clams, oysters, insects, fish, flowers, tobacco, potatoes, tomatoes, fruit, shrubs, trees, have their own varieties of smallpox, measles, cancer, or tuberculosis.
— Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History, London: Routledge and Sons, 1937, 7.

 

One of the most interesting features of the history of medicine is the course of deaths from pulmonary tuberculosis from 1850 onwards. It fell slowly but steadily from then until 1950. Then, with the widespread use of potent chemotherapy, there was a great acceleration in the fall of mortality… Once an effective treatment had been discovered, its results were immediately apparent. The slow improvement over the previous hundred years was no more than a reflection of the rising standard of living.
— Macfarlane Burnet, (1899 – 1984), Dominant Mammal, Heinemann 1970, 104.

 

The French Society also offers … a medal worth sixty pounds for the introduction and acclimatisation of the cinchona or Peruvian bark, producing quinine, in Europe or any of the European colonies.
— ‘Acclimatisation’, a lecture given by Dr George Bennett, Sydney, 1862.

 

Pathogenicity may be something of a disadvantage for a microbe, carrying lethal risks more frightening to them than to us. The man who catches a meningococcus is in considerably less danger for his life, even without chemotherapy, than meningococci with the bad luck to catch a man.
— Lewis Thomas (1913 – ), The Lives of a Cell, Penguin Books, 1978, 77.

 

Every time Homo sapiens made a molecular socket wrench to undo some vital bacterial function, the wily microbes simply changed the vulnerable assembly to a Phillips-headed screw.
— Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague, 432.

 

Here and there, on some fine lawny promontory or rocky mount, white villas and handsome cottages appeared, encircled with gardens and shrubberies, looking like the pretty ‘cottages ornees’ near some fashionable English watering-place; and perched amid as picturesque, but less cultivated scenery, were the cottages of pilots, fishermen, &c., making, to my ocean-wearied eyes, an Arcadia of beauty. Near the North Head is the quarantine-ground, off which one unlucky vessel was moored when we passed; and on the brow of the cliff a few tombstones indicate the burial-place of those unhappy exiles who die during the time of ordeal, and those whose golden dreams of the far-sought land of promise lead but to a lone and desolate grave on its storm-beaten shore.
— Louise Ann (Mrs Charles) Meredith, Notes and Sketches of New South Wales. London: John Murray, 1844, and Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1973, 34.