The 1920's were a time of great and rapid transition in the field of medicine. In another decade, antibiotics would completely transform the world. Four decades earlier - within living memory for many - doctors were still unaware that washing their hands and their instruments prior to surgery might be a good idea. Inoculation technique spread across the world and diabetes was conquered, but conditions caused some diseases to become worse than they had ever been before. More than anything else, perhaps, the 1920's were a major milestone in the rise to prominence of university-trained medical doctors.
Throughout the entire nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, there were essentially a number of competing forms of medical practice, of which doctors (as we think of them today, at least) were only one. This is in large part because pretty much all forms of medicine, including that of trained doctors, were languishing in medieval idiocy and none of them particularly worked. Until quite late in the nineteenth century, doctors believed in the ancient "four humors" theory of medicine, which essentially meant that the favorite "cures" were bleeding, blistering, purging, and the use of laxatives. Since bleeding was especially popular, the death rate was high among the patients.
Not surprisingly, this form of medicine had a number of competitors, several of which had much higher survival rates. Other methods included cures based on sanitariums (such as hydrotherapy and the "rest cure"), cures based on home remedies (such as herbalism), cures based on new - often strange - theories of health (such as Mesmerism and homeopathy), and cures based on making a fast buck (such as patent medicines.) Some of these had broad appeal to the populace, and medical practices we still use today came from a few of them - for example, hydrotherapy, a water-based cure that was extremely popular (possibly in part because it encouraged women to wear wet dresses), introduced the idea that bathing, fresh air, and exercise might perhaps be healthy. Others had a better cure rate than "scientific" medicine simply because they didn't actually do much of anything, which was better than getting bled.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, a great change occurred in university-based medicine. Those who have been following these Fun Facts faithfully will be surprised to learn that it did not begin in Russia, but in Paris (Katya handily explains this by noting that Paris had a Communist local government at the time, whereas Russia was still languishing under the Tsars. After the Revolution, she will proudly point out, Russia was among the first to introduce such innovations as socialized medicine. Admittedly the Russian socialized health care system was appallingly bad, but she blames that on Stalin, who did, after all, have a habit of summoning the very best doctors to his bedside and then killing them.)
The New French School, as it was called, introduced a number of innovations into the medical profession, the most remarkable of which was the idea that you should observe your patients to see if what you were doing made them better or worse, and change your techniques based on your observations. This radical notion received massive resistance from the established medical profession, and it took many decades before a significant number of doctors noticed that the techniques of the New French School - washing hands and instruments, using anaesthetics, not bleeding the cholera patients - seemed to actually sometimes work.
Once the idea took hold, medical science began to advance rapidly. Germ theory was introduced and widely accepted, forever changing the face of both preventative and curative medicine. Inoculations were proven to prevent smallpox, and with astonishing speed, inoculation programs were introduced around the entire world. Smallpox and polio dwindled and, eventually, vanished. Universities changed their programs to reflect modern theories, and new medical schools sprang up like mushrooms as establishment medical science grew in success and popularity. In 1921, insulin was manufactured and the deadly disease diabetes became controllable.
However, university medicine still had its competitors well into the twentieth century - until, that is, the Rockefeller Foundation decided to eliminate them. In what may be the most well-publicized, well-funded, and overt conspiracy in the world, the Rockefeller Foundation set out to discredit and eliminate all medical theories in competition with the medical schools - largely because they had put a great deal of money into investing in the new pharmaceutical industry which had sprung up around them. The Rockefeller Foundation disseminated a good deal of truth about quackery - but also discredited a number of promising techniques, and buried information about some of the problems with the new medicines - such as the link between immunizations and cancer, which was discovered in the 1920's but hidden until quite recently, and the fact that "live" inoculations can cause the very disease they set out to prevent, which came out somewhat sooner.
Meanwhile, while medical techniques were getting better, diseases seemed to be getting worse. Crowding, pollution, and improved transportation helped make a number of diseases more dangerous; cancer, tuberculosis, and cholera rates skyrocketed; everyone in the 1920's remember the devastating influenza pandemic of 1918, which killed over twenty million people worldwide (ten million in India alone.) At times it seemed as if doctors were winning more battles but losing the war.
Still, people became more and more aware of the skill of modern doctos, and respect for them grew greatly. In many places they had already been treated with near-worship even when their techniques didn't work at all (canny Russia was an exception to this); when their techniques started actually being successful, respect for them only grew. After the discovery of antibiotics, their pronouncements would be treated almost as divine oracle for several decades, before the backlash occurred and they were seen to be merely mortal.
But until then, have fun being sick.
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