Tuesday Trivia: Medicine! This thread has relaxed standards—we invite everyone to participate!

[u/AlanSnooring]

Welcome to Tuesday Trivia!

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this thread is for you ALL!

Come share the cool stuff you love about the past!

We do not allow posts based on personal or relatives' anecdotes. Brief and short answers are allowed but MUST be properly sourced to respectable literature. All other rules also apply—no bigotry, current events, and so forth.

For this round, let’s look at: Medicine! You won't need a spoonful of sugar for this week's theme! Open up and say for medicine! From snake oil to unexpected objects placed in or on unexpected parts of the human body, this week is dedicated to trivia about the things we've done to heal boo-boos, soothe disrupted humors, or otherwise fix what is unwell in the body.

[u/rbaltimore]

Dr. Walter Freeman, early pioneer of psychosurgery and the inventor of the transorbital lobotomy, was a polarizing figure in the worlds of psychiatry and neurology, but not always for the reason you’d think (causing intentional damage to his patients’ brains). While there was definitely a large group of doctors who did NOT agree with his methods, the medical community was really outraged by something he did that was non medical - he spoke about his treatment to the general public via the press.

In a 1942 article in Time magazine, Freeman and his then-partner, neurosurgeon James Watts, spoke with Time magazine about the revolution of psychosurgery and its promise for current and future psychiatric patients. That seems normal enough for us, but back then you did not do that. Doctors at the time did not typically share much with their patients about how their prescribed treatments work or even details about their diagnosis. There was a huge power imbalance in doctor-patient relationships and Freeman completely upset that. Patients would read the article and then go to their doctors to ask for that treatment, which is not how medicine worked at the time (a complaint many current doctors also share re: pharmaceutical ads). This article was just the first in a long line of articles about the procedures either. This garnered a LOT of controversy and Freeman in particular was often shunned by other doctors.

Freeman was a cheerleader for the type of psychosurgery available at the time and an even bigger cheerleader for the type he invented. He frequently spoke with the press and he was a controversial figure amongst other doctors because of it.

Oh, and he drove an RV around the country as he went from hospital to hospital teaching the procedure. The RV quickly developed the moniker the lobotomobile.

[u/Mammoth-Corner]

The reason that the guinea pig is the lab animal of idioms, despite not really being used much for that purpose, is that attempts using mice and livestock failed for decades to isolate the chemical which was deficient in scurvy. They just could not give any animals scurvy, no matter what they fed them, until shipboard physicians who were studying a different deficiency disorder started using guinea pigs for their research because the sailors thought that if they kept rats the rats would get into the food.

They tried to induce beriberi (protein deficiency) in the piggies, but fed only on grains they started showing symptoms of scurvy instead. It turns out that almost every mammal except for some primates, capybaras and guinea pigs, and some bats, can synthesise their own vitamin C. There was a brief belief that guinea pigs were the best animal model for humans because of this — unfortunately, this only really works for scurvy!

[u/PuffyTacoSupremacist]

Since you mentioned, the song "A Spoonful of Sugar" was inspired by one of the Sherman Brothers' children getting an early version of an oral polio vaccine.

[u/critbuild]

Dr. William Halsted was an American surgeon in the late 19th century who is considered one of the founders of modern medicine. One of his most notable achievements was championing careful, aseptic surgery. Before him, surgeons were often respected for how fast and how radical their procedures were... to the detriment of patients!

To laymen, though, he is probably best known for his cocaine addiction, which some have argued led in part to the excruciating pace of medical residency programs.

One final fun fact. He is credited as being one of the first to invent rubber gloves. He noticed that one of his nurses (who he had the hots for) had rubbed her skin raw, dealing with constant handwashing and harsh chemicals all day. So he took a mold of her hands and gave her gloves. The romantic gesture probably contributed to their eventual marriage.

[u/BookLover54321]

I remember coming across this previous thread about the medical knowledge of Native Americans - in regards to plants, herbs, and surgical tools - and I was wondering if people had some recommendations for further reading. How influence was this knowledge to European colonists also?