Thoughts On The Individualism of Disease

To continue the fight against presentism

The thing about the humoral theory was that it was highly individualistic. Why did one person get a disease and not another? Well, see that person was more sanguine (i.e: had more blood in them.) So, when the evil miasma caused by the conjunction of Jupiter and the moon, that person is susceptible to the illness. Ok, that explains why some of us get sick and some don’t, I guess.

But that means we can’t solve the problem, doesn’t it? And that is really handy. If someone dies, it can never be medical malpractice. It’s always the patient’s fault. They had too much of that one mysterious spiritual substance that could really be anything.

And it sounds exactly like many alternative medicine modalities. They love an ‘individualized’ treatment that will get to the cause of the illness, which is somehow a combination of things that you did and felt. Double-points for when those causes are vague and not closely connected to anything in the real world.

So…once more: don’t get uppity about the past, and please learn something from it.