Medicine in 1726

Gulliver Explains to the Houyhnhnms

Jonathan Swift, aka Lemuel Gulliver.

In her May 4 letter,  Heather Cox Richardson explains that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services and a member Donald Trump's cabinet, appears not to believe in "the foundational principle of modern medicine: germ theory." Instead, he seems to be attracted by the older "miasma theory" and also "terrain theory."

I found this news sufficiently depressing that I went in search of an antidote. Fortunately, one was ready to hand. I had recently reread Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, which was first published in 1726. In the last part of the book, Gulliver finds himself in the land of the Houyhnhnms, explaining medicine to his Houyhnhnm host, who is a horse (all the Houyhnhnms are horses).

He told his host that "there was a Sort of People bred up among us, in the Profession or Pretence of curing the Sick. ... Their fundamental is that all Diseases arise from Repletion [a state of being filled or overfilled]; from whence they conclude that a great Evacuation of the Body is necessary, either through the natural Passage, or upwards at the Mouth. Their next Business is from Herbs, Minerals, Gums, Oyls, Shells, Salts, Juices, Sea-weed, Excrements, Barks of Trees, Serpents, Toads, Frogs, Spiders, dead Men's Flesh and Bones, Beasts and Fishes, to form a Composition for Smell and Taste the most abominable, nauseous and detestable, that they can possibly contrive, which the Stomach immediately rejects with Loathing: And this they call a Vomit. Or else from the same Store-house, with some other poynsonous Additions, they command us to take in at the Orifice above or below (just as the Physician then happens to be disposed), a Medicine equally annoying and disgustful to the Bowels; which relaxing the Belly, drives down all before it: And this they call a Purge, or a Clyster." 

(Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, ed. Daniel Cook, 2023, pp. 255-256; if you're looking at a different edition, search in part 4, chapter 6.) 

There's more, but I'll spare you.

People have been sending copies of George Orwell's 1984 to their senators and members of Congress. I think maybe I'll start going to used bookstores and picking up dog-eared copies of Gulliver's Travels and sending them to Washington, D.C. 

Quack.

The portrait of Jonathan Swift above was painted by Charles Jervas in 1710. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. 

See also The 800-Pound Gorilla in the Oval Office.