Wise women

[Pixel42]

Here in the UK Channel 4 have just started a series about the worst jobs in history, fronted by Tony Robinson (Baldrick from Blackadder).

Saturday's Guardian had an article describing some of these jobs, and giving their modern-day equivalents. I thought the regular readers of this forum would find this one amusing:

Wise Woman

Medieval man's staggering failure to equate ill health with the fact that he never washed ensured that insidious quackery became a popular alternative to common sense. In times of sickness it was to the laughably mistitled "wise woman" that the stupid most frequently turned, her numerous roles - "midwife, agony aunt, district nurse", etc - offering reassurance and an array of preposterous "cures", even though she was, in fact, as qualified to practise medicine as the average carpet and almost cetainly mad as a pig. Still, the crone was nothing if not resourceful, with a treatment cabinet that contained everything from live eels (rubbed on warts and then buried), nettles (battered across pensioners' knees to "reduce aching joints") and worms (strung together and worn around the neck to "cure" sore throats). All cracking fun, unless, of course, her "cures" failed to appease her community, in which case they forced her to drag a massive iron gate across the village before drowning her as a witch.
Today's equivalent: alternative health practitioner

 

[wittgenst3in]

First thing that came to mind:
(From IMDB.)

Edmund Blackadder : I seek information about a Wisewoman.

Crone: Ah, the Wisewoman... the Wisewoman.

Edmund Blackadder : Yes, the Wisewoman.

Crone: Two things, my lord, must thee know of the Wisewoman. First, she is... a woman. And second, she is...

Edmund Blackadder : Wise?

Crone: You do know her then?

Edmund Blackadder : No, just a wild stab in the dark which is incidentally what you'll be getting if you don't start being a bit more helpful. Do you know where she lives?

Crone: Of course.

Edmund Blackadder : Where?

Crone: Here. Do you have an appointment?

Edmund Blackadder : No.

Crone: Well, you can go in anyway.

Edmund Blackadder : Thank you young crone. Here is a purse of moneys... which I'm not going to give to you.

 

[The Don]

IIRC from 'O' level French, isn't a midwife called une sagefemme ?

 

[Flo]

IIRC from 'O' level French, isn't a midwife called une sagefemme ?

Bravo, mon ami !

 

[Eleatic Stranger]

All cracking fun, unless, of course, her "cures" failed to appease her community, in which case they forced her to drag a massive iron gate across the village before drowning her as a witch.

Sometimes I wonder if our remote ancestors were not, in many ways, much much wiser than we.....

 

[jambo372]

I know that these cures probably don't work but don't mock them completely there is sometimes interesting stuff behind them .
For example in the olden days people would suck on rotten apples covered by asperigillus mould to cure throat infections . Mould may look minging but it's actually very valuable stuff in food & pharmaceutical industries - eg blue cheese , penicillin & cephalosporin antibiotics . Nowadays bacterial throat infection is often treated with a drug from one of these classes - so basically we used mould for sore throats & we still use mould for sore throats - just in a more sophisticated way .

 

[wittgenst3in]

I know that these cures probably don't work but don't mock them completely there is sometimes interesting stuff behind them .

True, in some cases there are beneficial effects behind age-old practices. However unless you examine them closely in procedures like double-blind testing you can't be sure if it works or not.

But, in some cases (such as homeopathy), there is strong reason to think that it will not do any good, because there is no conceivable mechanism that we know of for the treatment to take affect. The cannonical example is homeopathy's claim that more dilute substances are more potent. In most cases there would not be a single atom of the original remaining, so in order for it to work we would have to overturn much of the basis of modern physics and chemistry. (Such as the unspoken principle in chemistry that in order for a chemical to react, it actually has to be there.)

For example in the olden days people would suck on rotten apples covered by asperigillus mould to cure throat infections . Mould may look minging but it's actually very valuable stuff in food & pharmaceutical industries - eg blue cheese , penicillin & cephalosporin antibiotics . Nowadays bacterial throat infection is often treated with a drug from one of these classes - so basically we used mould for sore throats & we still use mould for sore throats - just in a more sophisticated way .

Yikes. I've worked in the culture growth industry (well, yoghurt...) and the steps we take to ensure that only one (or two) types of bacteria grow, and that these are the strains we want are mind boggling. Things like controlling temperature, pressure, nutrient content, extreme amounts of vat-cleaning after production (acid AND caustic at scalding temperatures).

I've seen some control system and reactor design specs for biological stuff (like antibotics) and they have to be extremely careful with things like temperature probe placement and control weightings to ensure the temperature is uniform enough throughout the whole vat for the good stuff to grow nicely (and quickly...).

The thought of picking up a rotten apple with god knows what crawling on it and putting it in my mouth gives me the heebie jeebies. Enough people manage to make themselves sick on 'home brew' to demonstrate what happens when bacteria go bad.

Back to the alternate medicine again, it is vital that claims undergo rigerous testing. In medicine a useful method of calculating what we know, is not the number of things that work, but the number of things we've shown that don't work. (e.g. Do a google search on gastric-freezing). These are things that have been discounted from the body of medicine, and there have been heaps.

A interesting thing when looking at alternative medicine is that there dosen't seem to have been (m)any discarded techniques in their history, in fact they often claim that little has changed in hundreds of years. (E.g. Traditional Chinese Medicine, where a 3k yr old book is still the first thing to read. I think it was called emperors yellow book, or similar) Now this could be because their knowledge was so perfect to begin with, or maybe it suggests that they can't differentiate between the good stuff and the bogus stuff.

[Editited for punctuation.]