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Nineteenth-Century Helath:-3
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June 5 - Nineteenth-Century Health:
The Good Old Days Were Terrible-3

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And there was a woman in the crowd who had had a hemorrhage for twelve years. She had spent everything she had on doctors and still could find no cure. Luke 8:43, NLT.

If you would have gotten sick in most of the nineteenth century you certainly wouldn't want to visit a hospital. A trip tended to be a death sentence in an era before the knowledge of germs. Epidemics were regular visitors to those unhygienic institutions originally founded for the poor. A hospital in the 1840s was a place of last resort-somewhere to go to die. People with money had physicians treat them at home.

Unfortunately, home medical practice wasn't alll that sophisticated. The commmon view of disease was that the bodily "humors" must be out of balance. The cure: rebalance them. A first step in that process often involved bleeding off some of the excess blood, often a pint or two. Purging the body generally followed bloodletting. Physicians did that through the administration of powerful drugs, often compounded partly from mercury and strychnine, substances that we now know to be extremely poisonous.

But in an age that believed that fever, diarrhea, and vomiting were symptoms of recovery, such drugs had the disired effect of rapidly and violently emptying the body of excess fluids. No wonder they called it the age of "heroic" medicine.

Surgery, meanwhile, was no less heroic when one considers that it involved no anesthesia. One only has to recall young Uriah Smith getting his leg amputated on the kitchen table with no anesthetic but his mother's hand. And even after the surgery, one's prospects were poor given the fact of the unsanitary conditions caused by a lack of knowledge of germs.

And what did it take to become a phsician? Not much. Four to eight months in one of the diploma mills would earn a medical degree, even if a person hadn't gone to high school.

It is little wonder that Oliver Wendell Homes declared that "if the whole materia medica as snow used could be sunk to the botton of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind, and all the worse for the fishes."

Ellen White's son Edson had one of those M.D. Degrees. He quipped of his experience that the physician in charge "is a villain-the Hygieo-Therapeutic Clinic is a humbug, and the Old Doctor Mill ought to be tipped into the Delaware" River.

Error is a killer.

Truth sets us free-even in the physical realm.

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In this formative period of their children's life, the responsibility of parents is very great.(COL 53).
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