{"id":28877,"date":"2015-12-30T01:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-12-30T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=28877"},"modified":"2015-12-20T12:19:28","modified_gmt":"2015-12-20T17:19:28","slug":"qotd-medicine-before-antibiotics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/12\/30\/qotd-medicine-before-antibiotics\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Medicine before antibiotics"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Explanation was the real business of medicine. What the ill patient and his family wanted most was to know the name of the illness, and then, if possible, what had caused it, and finally, most important of all, how it was likely to turn out<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>During the third and fourth years of [medical] school it gradually dawned on us that we didn\u2019t know much that was really useful, that we could do nothing to change the course of the great majority of the diseases we were so busy analyzing, that medicine, for all its fa\u00e7ade as a learned profession, was in real life a profoundly ignorant occupation<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Once you were admitted [to hospital] \u2026 it became a matter of waiting for the illness to finish itself one way or the other \u2026 Medicine made little or no difference.<\/p>\n<p>Lewis Thomas, <em>The Youngest Science<\/em>, 1983, quoted by John Derbyshire in <a href=\"http:\/\/takimag.com\/article\/the_scariest_science_john_derbyshire\/print#axzz3JxKmGe2K\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;The Scariest Science&#8221;, <em>Taki&#8217;s Magazine<\/em><\/a>, 2014-11-13.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Explanation was the real business of medicine. What the ill patient and his family wanted most was to know the name of the illness, and then, if possible, what had caused it, and finally, most important of all, how it was likely to turn out [&#8230;] During the third and fourth years of [medical] school [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,7,41,16],"tags":[243],"class_list":["post-28877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-science","category-history","category-quotations","category-science","tag-medicine"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7vL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28877"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28879,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28877\/revisions\/28879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}