The Psychosomatic Approach to Primary Chronic Rheumatoid Arthritis. (1965) Ehrlich

I then called in a very competent surgeon whose skill corrected unstable knees and useless hands.

I remember looking after patients who had seen surgeons like that. Knees were 'corrected' in those days, before replacement, with arthrodesis - fixed straight. Hands were converted from quite useful claws to completely useless ping-pong bats with fingers nicely straight but incapable of lifting a fork. As a result husbands were 'tyrannised' by having to feed their wives and take them to the toilet.

 

The attending physicians often begged me to take over the total treatment; they pleaded.

It must be true from a man called Ehrlich. It sounds like he shares some unknown psychiatric complex with Wessely.

 

The above reminded me of the following bit of the interview with SW on The Life Scientific:

Source: https://www.meassociation.org.uk/20...life-scientific-bbc-radio-4-13-february-2017/

As I’ve written before, it’s almost as if the only thing we learn from the history of medicine is that we don’t learn from the history of medicine.

 

Yes, well they would have done - anything to palm off a patient with an incurable illness you had no idea what to do for.

 

And now they hate us even more because Wessely's massive ego can't handle failure. Great job. Not many people actually manage to regress an entire field of medicine. Actually, make that two with GWI. The guy is almost impressively bad at his job.

Same with peptic ulcers
Same with Crohn's disease
Same with Lupus
Same with so many others and plenty more still left

Always the same language. The same illogic. The same assumptions. The same explanations. Some texts you could put side-by-side and struggle to tell apart despite being separated by a century.

That's actually one of the most fascinating tidbit in this, many actual historians of medicine are psychosocial fluffers. The very people who are supposed to learn about the history of medicine are themselves happily and enthusiastically encouraging the same mistakes with zero awareness that they are doing just that. They don't see the parallels despite the language, diagrams, methods and assumptions being identical. It's almost impressive.

Henrik Vogt may be one of the most fascinating specimens. The guy is actively promoting pseudoscience that probably even makes many homeopaths cringe and he has or is working on a PhD in history of medicine. People like that are like parodies of cluelessness but they are actually real and have real impact on the world.

 

I like that there's the bit about the patients being strongly disliked and not making the connection that it's not at all about whatever this guy thinks he's skillfully doing, rather they're offloading what they think is garbage waste of their time.

Somehow makes me think of Flowers for Algernon. The cluelessness, but somehow mixed with some of the later smarts, still the cluelessness definitely outweighs. If only they had even half of his morality and good nature.

 

Are there any studies or just articles describing these surgeries? How inadequate they were?