#18 A WOMAN’S BRIEF --

 

Perhaps you’ve heard the story that George Washington (yes, that one) was bled to death. It’s not likely found in Civics textbooks. Oh, right, we rarely use Civics textbooks any longer. At any rate ~

 

Enamored of his vast Virginia plantation, one day recently retired Washington spent more time than he ought on horseback in inclement weather inspecting it all. Late returning home he was, and rather than face a woman’s reprisals, he sat in damp, cold clothes through dinner. Shortly thereafter, he developed a sore throat. Shortly after that, three imminent physicians did what in 1799 was best: they bled him. To death. 

 

Washington was unquestionably an admirable military man, but the most amazing man of the eighteenth-century moment was a man of medicine, Dr. Benjamin Rush. At age fourteen he graduated what we call Princeton. After two years at the University of Edinburgh he received his medical degree (1768). Patriot, professor, physician, and Presbyterian, he signed the Declaration of Independence, translated Greek, fathered thirteen children, wrote America’s first chemistry textbook, and took time to destroy the careers of others. He was brilliant, kind to the poor, in favor of educating women, anti-slavery, dedicated social reformer, humorless, caustic, uncompromising, and the creator of “depletion therapy.” America’s “Prince of Bleeding.”

 

His is a story worth knowing, but not here. It is likely this brilliant man was acquainted with the fact that George Washington was bled to death. It is likely that he believed that Washington received the best possible treatment. Bill Bryson wrote of Rush, “During a yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia (1793), he bled hundreds of victims and was convinced that he had saved a great many when in fact all he did was fail to kill them all.” 

                “The Body,” Bill Bryson

 

 

Let’s face it, when a grown man’s body that contains around five quarts of blood is, over two days relieved of 40% of that, as was done to Washington, well, it comes as no surprise that the man has been relieved not of a sore throat, but of his life. “I die hard,” the president said after a poultice of cantharides, an emetic to induce vomiting, and three more bleedings.

 

Dr. Benjamin Rush was convinced that all illnesses could be traced to overheated blood. And what does one do in the late18th century about overheated blood? You open a vein to let it cool. You pour off bowls of it. In the opinion of Dr. Rush, the body had too much of it anyway; probably twice as much as a person needs.

“80% of Rush’s notional amount of blood could be removed with no ill effect,” Bryson wrote. “He was tragically wrong … yet never doubted the rightness of what he did.”

 

It is the “rightness” of our convictions that interests me. We are notional people, we Americans.

 

It is the captivating nature of certitude that concerns me. Certain we can be that the original bridge spanning Puget Sound Narrows collapsed on November 7, 1940. 

However, we seem ready to apply certitude to our notions of religion, philosophy, politics, and TV programming preferences. We seem reluctant to distinguish fact from conviction. What if Dr. Rush had been not quite so sure? What if he had respected those who questioned his notions? 

 

I think I’m ready for a shift away from stubborn certitude; from standpatism, from bleeding our culture of divergent ideas, of consideration, of goodness, of the value of questions, of kindness, of respect. What if, rather than veins, we open our minds?

 

We humans have been so wrong about so many things over the time of recorded history. So much certainty has collapsed with time. And, speaking of time, Ireland’s Bishop Ussher was wrong about it concerning the age of earth. Astronomy was sure but wrong for a long time about the stuff of space being stuck in static shells.

Humor is now something to make us laugh rather than a bodily fluid that determines disposition.

 Experts no longer expect spontaneous generation. They once were convinced of it. Sorry, but mice will not spontaneously arise from a soiled shirt placed in a vessel that held wheat grain (or in the shoes kicked off by my teen-aged sons).

 Did you grow up, as I did, convinced that chameleons changed colors to hide? Nah. Cuttlefish, maybe.

Did Christopher Columbus discover America? No. But is it hard for those of us of a certain age to debunk so strong a story.

 Did the sun stand still for Joshua? Would we exist if it had?

 Were witches burned at the stake in New England. Don’t be too sure. We have such a notion, but no. Witches in France were burned. In New England, those “surely witches” were hanged. Save one. Giles Corey was pressed to death under large stones.

By virtue of his social and professional prominence, his position as teacher and his facile pen Benjamin Rush had more influence upon American medicine and was more potent in propagation and long perpetuation of medical errors than any man of his day. To him, more than any other man in America, was due the great vogue of vomits, purging, and especially of bleeding, salivation and blistering, which blackened the record of medicine and afflicted the sick almost to the time of the Civil War (3).

              1929History of the Medical Department of the United States Army, P. M. Ashburn

Little feels better than being right. Right?