The Good for What Ails Us

I enjoy reading about health fads of the past. Their claims are bold, their language colorful, their tone earnest, and their promised remedies completely unrealistic. There is a certain charm in the suggestion that "Dr. Compton's Fennel Elixer" could cure baldness, purify the blood, and diminish the night fidgets, a charm utterly absent in today's bloodless health commercials.
Whether it's been ridiculous tonics or carefully applied leaches, there have always been remedies of dubious effect. When, after leaving Eden, Eve came down with that first case of the sniffles Adam , in a fit of genius, grabbed several catkins from a pussy willow and gave them to his patient, instructing her to place them in her nostrils, promising that they would draw out the evil humors. And thus was born the field of medicine (and the writing of apocrypha).
I don't mean to suggest that all medicine is snake oil. I am very grateful to doctors and to the science behind our medicine.
But here's what interests me. If each generation has found amusing much of what the previous generation found medically compelling, it seems that there are two ways of responding to that insight.
For the most part we respond to that insight with the smug conviction that everyone who came before us was adorably stupid. "Tonics for female sickness" we shriek, in a tone of incredulous fondness. "All those well-meaning primitives who proceeded us . . . " we murmur, with a disbelieving little shake of our heads.
Well that's one way to respond to the evidence that at any given point in human history a good portion of what we believed about health was, as it turns out, balderdash and poppycock. We can respond with disdain and, perhaps, sympathy that those benighted souls did not have the good fortune to live in a wiser, more sensible age, an age like our own, an age of pure science.
Or we can respond to that chastening insight with humility. We can look at the evidence and conclude that much of what we believe now with unshakable conviction will provoke the disdain of our posterity, assuming it does not actually prevent the production of our posterity.
I have some suspicions about what history will reckon to be our pharmaceutical follies but I'm less interested in arguing against specific remedies or diagnoses than in arguing for a general posture of intellectual modesty. I would like for every doctor to carry around, in addition to the stethoscopes and prescription pads a jar of leaches. I would like for every pharmacy to offer their customers complimentary teaspoons of castor oil with each prescription filled.
Because it's hard to write the prescription for the good for what ails us, when what ails us most is pride and vanity.