Why were people in the 1800s smart about engineering while dumb about medicine?
You’re inviting a long lecture from me, which none of us want. Speaking as someone with a very strong educational background in the history of science (and philosophy etc.), the most succinct answer I can give you is twofold: 1) The same reason people today are so smart about some things and so dense about others; and, 2) With few exceptions, the things that they didn’t know or were wrong about either were much, much less obvious in the historical context and/or they weren’t as wrong as people commonly think they were. My very favorite example is Ptolemaic (geocentric) astronomy. In the Amagest Ptolemy himself acknowledges that a heliocentric system is simpler and makes sense. But in order to accept a heliocentric view, one has to accept the idea of the Earth in motion (which is clearly and obviously deeply intuitively false) and (because of a lack of observed parallax) that the “fixed” stars were an inconceivably, impossibly large distance away from the Earth. Frankly, those two ideas
The points about hindsight being much easier than foresight are really true. We wouldn’t celebrate discoveries if they were easy. That jump to the obvious is really hard. There’s more to it than that though. The other half of it is that any new idea, good or bad, faces skepticism. It’s very hard to convince someone of something new even when the weight of evidence is against them. Science, in general, tends to attract people who are at least somewhat willing to reevaluate their beliefs with new evidence, but still changing one’s mind is usually a career-changing event. So what seems to happen is not that individuals accept new theories, but that changes are generational. If an idea is compelling enough, like doctors washnig their hands before child birth, or quantum mechanics, or plate techtonics, then it gets picked up by the young innovators and the older objectors slowly fade away. The net effect is that major changes in science tend to take a long time. This was formalized by Kuhn
ikkyu2, thanks for replying. I think you’ve got the Pare anecdote the wrong way round. According to his own account, he started off by cauterising wounds with boiling oil, following the accepted medical practice of the time. Then, on one occasion, he ran out of boiling oil and had to do the best he could by washing the wounds and treating them with an improvised dressing of egg yolk and turpentine. ‘That night’, he writes. ‘I could hardly sleep, fearing that for want of cauterising, I would find my patients dead in the morning’. To his astonishment, he found that they were resting well and that their wounds soon started to heal. I’m struck by your remark that “if I only had a time machine, I could have set him straight in a two-minute conversation”. This is an interesting thought-experiement, and worth pursuing further. Let’s suppose we could go back in a time machine to the battlefields of sixteenth-century Europe. What could we do to improve medical treatment and reduce mortality? 1.
