Can History Tell Us Anything?

By Author: Steven Johnson
Total Articles: 494
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Many people on the left have nothing good to say about the Fox Network. Apart from the shock-jocks telling the news as they see it, there's that terrible program about fighting crime, bringing people to justice through the application of science with Dr. Temperance Brennan digging up clues of past crimes through an analysis of bones. In fact, this really is a new game being played all round the world. Anthropologists are looking at the dead with a new eye. Starting with the mummified bodies they already have from Egypt, they have been guessing what medical problems they had while alive and what killed them. For example, it seems Tutankhamun had Klippel-Feil Syndrome. That's a fusion of the bones in your neck making it very difficult to turn your head. King Tut never bowed to no one during his lifetime. Caught up in all this useless diagnosis and medical speculation is poor Abe Lincoln — as if the poor man has not suffered enough. It seems some of his problems were caused by his taking Little Blue Pills. Before you start checking facts through wikipedia, this is not the modern version used to treat erectile dysfunction, ...
... but an early use of the name to treat clinical depression, then called melancholia (which, of course, can be associated with a loss of interest in sex). The key ingredient to this blue pill was mercury — about 120 times the safe daily intake according to modern doctors. The evidence for this is not scientific. That would take a hair sample and, so far, there is no hair available to test. But it seems his mood improved when he stopped taking the Blue Mass — again, completely the reverse of the modern experience — which suggests the mercury poisoning stopped.

Quite why modern science has developed this somewhat morbid interest in the past is hard to say. There may be some use in studying past outbreaks of influenza because we still get that today. But wondering whether Abe Lincoln was getting enough sex because of depression is not helping anyone. Equally, when you look at some of the often painful if not actually poisonous ways in which doctors and scientists did attempt to cure erectile dysfunction, all you learn is that men can be quite difficult to kill.

Although, perhaps there is a useful lesson to be learned from the history of our current erectile dysfunction drugs. Here we have a group of dedicated researchers conducting some very sophisticated clinical trials to find a cure. They were using an early version of the little blue pills, but not to treat erectile dysfunction. It was only the lucky accident of some men reporting erections as an unexpected side effect of the drug that history was made. The discovery was a lucky accident. This captures a truth about modern medicine. No matter how wise they try to act, most modern medicine is educated guesswork. When it comes to explaining how many drugs work or why a diagnosis is made, most doctors cannot explain. They prescribe the drugs and, surprisingly, they work. Except, in the case of cialis, there is a good scientific explanation of how and why it works. Developed after the little blue pills, cialis is a genuine scientific advance, providing either 36 hours of response as needed, or 24/7 response when taken once daily. Sometimes, scientists are as wise as they claim to be.