The Great Influenza Read Online Free Page A

were all ways that could restore balance. Such beliefs led physicians to recommend violent laxatives and other purgatives, as well as mustard plasters and other prescriptions that punished the body, that blistered it and theoretically restored balance. And of all the practices of medicine over the centuries, one of the the most enduring (yet least understandable to us today) was a perfectly logical extension of Hippocratic and Galenic thought, and recommended by both.
    This practice was bleeding patients. Bleeding was among the most common therapies employed to treat all manner of disorders.
    Deep into the nineteenth century, Hippocrates and most of those who followed him also believed that natural processes must not be interfered with. The various kinds of purging were meant to augment and accelerate natural processes, not resist them. Since pus, for example, was routinely seen in all kinds of wounds, pus was seen as a necessary part of healing. Until the late 1800s, physicians routinely would do nothing to avoid the generation of pus, and were reluctant even to drain it. Instead they referred to 'laudable pus.'
    Similarly, Hippocrates scorned surgery as intrusive, as interfering with nature's course; further, he saw it as a purely mechanical skill, beneath the calling of physicians who dealt in a far more intellectual realm. This intellectual arrogance would subsume the attitude of Western physicians for more than two thousand years.
    This is not to say that for two thousand years the Hippocratic texts and Galen offered the only theoretical constructs to explain health and disease. Many ideas and theories were advanced about how the body worked, how illness developed. And a rival school of thought gradually developed within the Hippocratic-Galenic tradition that valued experience and empiricism and challenged the purely theoretical.
    It is impossible to summarize all these theories in a few sentences, yet nearly all of them did share certain concepts: that health was a state of equilibrium and balance, and that illness resulted either from an internal imbalance within the body, or from external environmental influences such as an atmospheric miasma, or some combination of both.
    But in the early 1500s three men began to challenge at least the methods of medicine. Paracelsus declared he would investigate nature 'not by following that which those of old taught, but by our own observation of nature, confirmed by' experiment and by reasoning thereon.'
    Vesalius dissected human corpses and concluded that Galen's findings had come from animals and were deeply flawed. For his acts Vesalius was sentenced to death, although the sentence was commuted.
    Fracastorius, an astronomer, mathematician, botanist, and poet, meanwhile hypothesized that diseases had specific causes and that contagion 'passes from one thing to another and is originally caused by infection of the imperceptible particle.' One medical historian called his body of work 'a peak maybe unequalled by anyone between Hippocrates and Pasteur.'
    The contemporaries of these three men included Martin Luther and Copernicus, men who changed the world. In medicine the new ideas of Paracelsus, Vesalius, and Fracastorius did not change the world. In the actual practice of medicine they changed nothing at all.
    But the approach they called for did create ripples while the scholasticism of the Middle Ages that stultified nearly all fields of inquiry was beginning to decay. In 1605 Francis Bacon in Rerum Novarum attacked the purely deductive reasoning of logic, calling 'Aristotle' a mere bond-servant to his logic, thereby rendering it contentious and well nigh useless.' He also complained, 'The logic now in use serves rather to fix and give stability to the errors which have their foundation in commonly received notions than to help the search after truth. So it does more harm than good.'
    In 1628 Harvey traced the circulation of the blood, arguably perhaps the single greatest