According to Sheila Neal there wasn't overwhelming support for a physiological explanation at the time. My guess is that as time went on (and especially as we went into the sixties) a psychological explanation became more fashionable.
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Twitter account will provide headlines & quotes from the 1955 Royal Free Hospital outbreak to the day when each headline appeared - 65 years later
- Thread starter Kalliope
- Start date
Mithriel
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
I have no evidence to back up my ideas just the feeling I got as I grew up. The introduction of vaccines was literally life changing. There were over 3000 children killed by diphtheria in the years before the vaccine was introduced. Polio was devastating to a community and much feared. Measles, whooping cough and, of course, smallpox were no longer a constant threat to your children. Covid 19 is bad enough, but it is not the children who are the main victims, just think if it was.
The polio vaccine came out in 1956 and no one wanted there to be a new epidemic disease which left people severely ill for the rest of their lives. It has always been easy to forget ME patients, it is still happening, so the disease was consigned to history as a few hysterical women and some deluded doctors.
We are very bad at imagining consequences so as infections became rarer things like cancer (a word that was never said in those days, just a quick shake of the head) took centre stage and even there we persist in believing that it can be overcome by the right attitude.
A few years back, someone asked why people are not frightened of ME. We are all terrified of our children getting it, why is no one else? It is easier to live believing that infections are conquered, exercise will cure everything and only people who break the rules get sick. All that not taking into account the people making money of it and you can see why we are in the mess we are.
The polio vaccine came out in 1956 and no one wanted there to be a new epidemic disease which left people severely ill for the rest of their lives. It has always been easy to forget ME patients, it is still happening, so the disease was consigned to history as a few hysterical women and some deluded doctors.
We are very bad at imagining consequences so as infections became rarer things like cancer (a word that was never said in those days, just a quick shake of the head) took centre stage and even there we persist in believing that it can be overcome by the right attitude.
A few years back, someone asked why people are not frightened of ME. We are all terrified of our children getting it, why is no one else? It is easier to live believing that infections are conquered, exercise will cure everything and only people who break the rules get sick. All that not taking into account the people making money of it and you can see why we are in the mess we are.
In that recording of Shiela Neal saying there still are now (1988) people who think it was hysteria, it would have been interesting if she had been pushed to say whom , in general terms, she was referring to. One wonders whether there was disagreement within the teams treating the patients.
https://www.s4me.info/threads/greetings-from-rotterdam.18299/page-3#post-313847
There is an intersting post attaching a copy of Brain's textbook on neurology from 1962, said to be the reason for the WHO listing of ME as a neurological condition in 1969. It will be seen that this raises the issue of hysteria. It does look as though McEvedy was just a "cat's paw".
There is an intersting post attaching a copy of Brain's textbook on neurology from 1962, said to be the reason for the WHO listing of ME as a neurological condition in 1969. It will be seen that this raises the issue of hysteria. It does look as though McEvedy was just a "cat's paw".
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Mithriel
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Freud's theories are intertwined with neurology. If anything, it is slowly emerging from those rather than sinking into them.
Just a few years ago there was a report in the New Scientist about a conference on sleep. The reporter was shocked that there was a lecture on the meaning of dreams, but even more shocked that neurologists were taking it seriously.
Just a few years ago there was a report in the New Scientist about a conference on sleep. The reporter was shocked that there was a lecture on the meaning of dreams, but even more shocked that neurologists were taking it seriously.
Sorry to keep going on about this. I understand the dangers of boredom. However that text from Brain's 1962 book merely confirms the premise of the Twitter undertaking - the importance of going through the original and contemporaneous documents. It seems that much of what we have known is simply wrong.
McEvedy did not come to this subject with a new, or tentative, idea. He came with an idea expressed in the leading textbook of the time that "some believe... that it is a mass hysterical reaction in a community aflicted by a benign non -neurotropic virus".
From this you can "reverse engineer" what would be necessary to prove the point and it is clear that that is what M and B tried to do. But if you try that you have to be much more even-handed with the evidence. I seem to very vaguely recall being told in primary (edit- that should be junior) school in about 1964 the importance of trying to disprove your hypothesis. In any event, the language they use is "making a case for " the hysteria hypothesis. The best one can say of it is "case not proven".
McEvedy did not come to this subject with a new, or tentative, idea. He came with an idea expressed in the leading textbook of the time that "some believe... that it is a mass hysterical reaction in a community aflicted by a benign non -neurotropic virus".
From this you can "reverse engineer" what would be necessary to prove the point and it is clear that that is what M and B tried to do. But if you try that you have to be much more even-handed with the evidence. I seem to very vaguely recall being told in primary (edit- that should be junior) school in about 1964 the importance of trying to disprove your hypothesis. In any event, the language they use is "making a case for " the hysteria hypothesis. The best one can say of it is "case not proven".
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Kalliope
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
This Twitter account just shared a video clip of Colin McEvedy on why the majority of those who got ill during the Royal Free Hospital outbreak were women. It was quite chilling to watch.
The Tweet reads: Colin McEvedy (https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1700894/) from the Horizon documentary in 1988 (UK) on why so many women fell ill in the Royal Free Hospital outbreak in 1955. #mecfs #cfsme #MyalgicEncephalomyelitis #chronicfatiguesyndrome #medtwitter #myalgice #cfs.
The Tweet reads: Colin McEvedy (https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1700894/) from the Horizon documentary in 1988 (UK) on why so many women fell ill in the Royal Free Hospital outbreak in 1955. #mecfs #cfsme #MyalgicEncephalomyelitis #chronicfatiguesyndrome #medtwitter #myalgice #cfs.
EzzieD
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Ugh, I saw this on Twitter this morning and was utterly disgusted. I had to control my 'effort preference' to refrain from using a lot of rude words in response to it!
And there in a nutshell Colin McEvedy reveals the real problem with the British medical establishment. Given his plumby voice and the date when this was filmed, I am going to hazard a guess that he went to an all boys prep school, and then to an all boys public school, possibly even an all male Oxbridge college, and his parents were so well off his mummy never had to work. Men like this are utterly clueless about women, and seem to think we are all delicate fragile things, who swoon hysterically at the drop of a hat. They have probably never really encountered the kind of solid working class women, like my Irish grandmother and my mother, who worked full time their whole lives, held families together in difficult circumstances and had no time for the frivolity of "feminine weakness".
Sadly all of psychiatry has been developed by these deluded misogynistic public school idiots, who have absolutely no grasp on reality. Women are still suffering from the warped theories these privileged fools thought up. Hopefully younger doctors might come from a wider range of social backgrounds and have encountered some real women, but given my experiences with the medical profession to date, I am not holding my breath.
rvallee
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Zero attempt at validity or at making sense or reason of the facts. And nothing's changed. The words and labels have shifted a bit, but as reflects the video of Brian Walitt talking about fibromyalgia, from 2015, the exact same ideas are still the basis for ye olde conversion disorder that is applied to chronic illness.
For sure there are other pseudosciences out there that make more of an effort at making sense. This is just weaponized bigotry that achieves success through the raw application of power and passive torture. It has the exact same immorality as industries that kill and destroy environments, and one thing that can be said about those industries is that they make a lot of money and employ a lot of people. Humans have a remarkable ability to be morally flexible, and medicine has really shown that there are no exceptions to this, even they can wallow in the darkest corners of immoral behavior and feel great, even smugly superior, about it.
For sure there are other pseudosciences out there that make more of an effort at making sense. This is just weaponized bigotry that achieves success through the raw application of power and passive torture. It has the exact same immorality as industries that kill and destroy environments, and one thing that can be said about those industries is that they make a lot of money and employ a lot of people. Humans have a remarkable ability to be morally flexible, and medicine has really shown that there are no exceptions to this, even they can wallow in the darkest corners of immoral behavior and feel great, even smugly superior, about it.