The road to human self-transcendence is unusually long and arduous, or rather, "The History of Absurd Medicine" (by Lydia Kang and Nate Peterson, translated by Wang Xiuli and Zhao Yijie). Jiangxi Science Press, 2018. As described hereinafter referred to as "wilderness"), human beings in the long journey of entanglement and struggle with their own diseases, many times, even absurd.
From the third to the seventh century BC, it seems that human beings suddenly moved from obscurity to civilization. In the East, there was the Hundred Schools of Thought represented by Confucius and the Buddha Shakyamuni who appeared in India, and in the farther West, there appeared the Three Sages of Greece, called Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. However, after the Golden Age, the West was in the so-called "Dark Age" of the Middle Ages, from the fifth century onwards, which lasted for nearly 1,000 years. As far as the history of medicine is concerned, until the fifteenth century or more recently, in the eighteenth century, its medicine (ideas, methods, means, medicines, instruments, nursing, etc.) related to human health and well-being seems to have been in a period of obscurantism. At that time, as the "Introduction" to "Desolation" put it, "from today's point of view, these remedies seem to be extremely absurd." The weasel's testicles are used as contraceptives, bloodletting is used to cure blood loss, and hot soldering irons are used to cure love loss." Now let's look at the history and story of medicine that, in addition to the three, seem absurd today but take for granted at the time.
Syphilis, since the fifteenth century, has plagued Europe and China for centuries. Europe calls it "bullous rash", and China calls it "bayberry sores". In the sixteenth century, mercury was introduced into the medical practice of treating syphilis in Europe. Although there were also objections at the time, due to the discovery and use of mercuric chloride, patients felt relaxed and comfortable, and because of the large amount of saliva secretion after taking it, it was considered to be detoxification. As a result, a form of syphilis called "mercury package" treatment has taken Europe by storm. What is a "Mercury Package"? In short, it is a steam bath made of mercury. Today we know that mercury poisoning is a chronic but severely toxic event in people (i.e., damage to the internal organs of the brain). At that time, this popular method of treating syphilis became a certain fashion. "Ara" said that the famous violinist Niccolò Paganini actually died after syphilis in the "mercury package". In fact, the ancestors who used mercury to treat diseases were not Europe but Middle-earth. Lu Xun had a very famous article called "Wei Jin's Demeanor and the Relationship between Articles and Medicine and Wine.". According to Ge Hong, a famous Taoist scholar, famous alchemist and medicinal scientist in the Eastern Jin Dynasty, the five stone scatters were made of "Dansha", "Xionghuang", "Bai Alum", "Zeng Qing" and "Cishi". According to today's chemical report, "Dansha" contains 86.2% mercury. This medicine was still prevalent until the Song Dynasty. In his letters with Chen Jichang and other friends, Su Shi talked more than once about the alchemy of "Dan" (see book IV of Su Shi's Collected Writings). In fact, mercury is still the main ingredient for the emperors to refine the elixir of immortality. Even Tang Taizong, the Holy Lord of the Ming Dynasty, did not achieve the life expectancy of "Ancient Lai" because of his obedience to "Dan". That is to say, before the invention of the antibiotic penicillin (early twentieth century), diseases caused by bacteria such as syphilis and pneumonia were incurable diseases.
Ask who would (dare) to soak in a mercury steam bath heated with mercury today!
As an antidote or analgesic, the history of taking clay is not as old as the history of taking the poppy, but it has existed in Europe at least in the sixth century BC, the book "Desert" says. In 1581, Wolfgang II of Germany believed that a death row prisoner who was about to be executed, a "seal" with the addition of a "seal" (of God or priesthood) could relieve pain. It is said that it is harvested from the mountains of Striga, and it is covered with clay with a special seal, which can cure all diseases. As a result, this kind of "Indo-Earth" with gods became popular in Europe. It was not until the rise of modern medicine that this "Indian soil" became the collection of the antique rooms or bogu shelves of the rich europeans. In fact, the use of soil as medicine is more than one in Li Shizhen's "Compendium of Materia Medica". The "Compendium of Materia Medica/Soil" has a total of "chalk", "loess", "soil beehive", "dung beetle turning pills", "earthworm mud", "snail mud", "white eel mud", "udon mud" and so on. The records of drugs are even more rarely heard in the "Compendium of Materia Medica". For example, in the "Compendium of Materia Medica/HumanIties", there are medicines such as "hair hair" and "random hair" (I don't know what is the difference between "hair" and "random hair"?). ), "head scale", "earplugs", "knees", "human urine", "dripping stones", "milk", "mouth spit", "human blood", "human cells" and so on. Animal medicine, in the "Materia Medica", almost all the squirming animals that fly in the sky, swim in the water, and crawl on the ground can be used to make medicine, including the "wind beaver" and "badger" that may induce sars in 2003, and the "volt wing" ("volt wing" that may induce new viruses in 2020. It's just that the Compendium of Materia Medica puts this flying mammal in the "Birds" section.)
The development of pharmacology is one of the important achievements of modern medicine. It benefits from physical chemistry and biochemistry. The most important of these was the invention and use of antibiotics. Before they were invented, pharmacology was mostly empirical, clinical. Even if Zhang Zhongjing's (third century AD) "Treatise on Typhoid Fever and Miscellaneous Diseases" was greatly advanced, Ke Yunbo's "Typhoid Wings" of the Qing Dynasty was only experience. The first soup of "Typhoid Wings" is called "Guizhi Soup". The "Typhoid Wing" says: "This is the leader of the Zhongjing group, it is the general party that nourishes yin and yang, reconciles the camp guards, and relieves muscle sweating"; the "Typhoid Wing" also says that "whoever has a headache and fever, a bad wind and a cold ... no matter what the scriptures, regardless of stroke, typhoid fever, miscellaneous diseases, salty use this sweat." This said, at that time, like the Westerners", "Indian soil" generally covered all diseases, so what about its medicinal components? It couldn't be simpler: "Du Zhi", "Peony", "Licorice", "Ginger", "Jujube". We know today that the quinine used to treat malaria is derived from the "Materia Medica", that is, from the bark of the cinchona tree (or similar crop) of the rubiaceae family, but it is still a chemically formulated alkaloid with the formula c20h24n2o2. Similarly, due to the resistance used in quinine, The Chinese Nobel Prize-winning Tu Youyou, the substitute for quinine extracted from the "Materia Medica" Artemisia annua (or a similar crop) is not a traditional concoction, but a chemical synthesis of modern pharmacology (1973, dihydroartemisinin, its molecular formula is c15h24o5).
Today, do people still eat Western "Indian soil" and Chinese "white eel mud" and "head dirt"?
Modern medicine (including medical systems, medical means, medical devices, medical drugs, medical care, and of course medical ethics, etc.) is built on a platform of rationality, science and law. Of course, it is also based on a number of medical absurd cases. Or rather, at a number of costs.
When drugs do not guarantee the health and life of the patient or the human body, surgery is pushed to the forefront of medicine. As the book "Wild" says, "Surgery breaks through the final and ultimate barrier— the human body itself." Cutting the skin, penetrating the eyeball, sawing off the bones, ligating blood vessels means that the evolutionary history of nature and disease and trauma is changing. "From the perspective of Hua Tuo and Guan Yu's bone removal and healing, from ancient times to the present, surgery has been an important means of medical treatment, and it is also a topic that must be faced in the history of medicine. From the third century when Guan Yu was bone-removing and healing, until the nineteenth century, reliable anesthetics had not yet appeared. Thus, with the heroic image of Guan Yu with an iron backbone, the author of the "Desert" book may not know this story. The use of instruments in Europe to operate on patients is indeed a history of human or individual patient pain. In the eighteenth century, doctors used specially made machetes or saws to cut the bones and saw bones of the sick. The procedure is to cut the skin and muscle outside the bone with a knife, and then use a saw to saw the bone open or saw off. The blood flow is treated with a cautery (hot iron, boiling oil, etc.), and the muscles are either left untreated or sutured. It is said that the famous doctors at that time were greater than the number of bones that could be cut or sawn open at the same time. A Scottish doctor named Benjamin Bell was able to amputate a thigh in six seconds. French physician Jean Laré completed 200 amputations in 24 hours during the Napoleonic Wars. French doctors will surely come out on top of the total number of amputations, but at a speed a second slower than the Scottish doctor. Even more miraculous was a Scottish doctor named Liston, who, during his lecture, cut off a bone, put a knife in the middle of his teeth, and shouted at his students and onlookers: "Gentlemen, time me!" Gentlemen! Time me! "This is where the cure is, this is being an actor – a super actor who cuts bones or saws bones!" This is where the pain of the patient is concerned, which is playing some kind of tragicomedy of the most absurd and terrible divine powers. Fortunately, no images remained at that time, and if they had, wouldn't this have been the most barbaric act of our human beings in our march toward civilization and sanity? But it is precisely because of this price that there are modern medicines such as preoperative preparation, sterility, anesthesia, surgery under modern instruments and postoperative care. Especially because a generation of more advanced surgical instruments than a generation, there is also the concept of modern surgery: painless, fast healing.
On the long journey from obscurity to civilization, human beings have experienced the use of witchcraft to control the weather, predict auspiciousness, bless their children and grandchildren, and live a long and healthy life as described in "Golden Branch", and have also experienced various absurd things described in the "History of Absurd Medicine" for their own sake, until today. When the black death, which was extremely panicked in the late European Middle Ages, and smallpox, which caused headaches to mankind around the world, became history, from the mid-to-late twentieth century to the twenty-first century, beginning with the third millennium, human beings had to face new diseases in addition to old diseases that had never been seen before. However, the greatness of mankind lies in the fact that the beings on this earth will think, learn lessons, think of ways, and face together.
The most important work on the history of science of the twentieth century, the History of Science (by w.c. Dampier, translated by Li Heng). Chinese min University Press, 2010) said that when human beings entered the seventeenth century, botany and chemistry opened a new era of pharmacology; in the eighteenth century, the combination of chemistry and medicine promoted the development of medicine; from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the combination of biology, chemistry and medicine, especially "one of the most amazing developments in biology, is a great improvement in people's understanding of the sources and causes of bacterial diseases in animals, plants and humans." And this judgment and value provided a smooth path for later medicine.
A "Golden Branch" that studies the primitive psychology and state of human beings, a "History of Science" that studies the history of Western science, and a "History of Absurd Medicine" that specializes in the study of an unforgettable past in the history of Western medicine all point to the fact that although human progress has paid a price at every step, the forward movement of mankind is always accompanied by rationality, science and corresponding systems. Human beings are constantly surpassing themselves, which is human optimism. But after experiencing the absurd, there should be no more absurdity, as "an interesting and informative prehistory of world medicine" (the extension of this book) "The History of Absurd Medicine" tells me.
(Urgently written on January 31, 2020, when the new pneumonia is still blazing.) Sufu Tianba Eight Meter Residence)
Source: Beijing Evening News
Author: Liu Huo
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