A Brief History of Modern Medicine

https://changingaging.org/aging101/the-flexner-report/

通俗英语版，俺用了半小时仔细读过。反复想了几天，有点儿明白了为什么早期在中国办医院的洋人对中医的热衷，而学了洋医的国人却坚决反对中医。

自文艺复兴以来，西方文明有了全面的进步，医学也是。各种流派杂存，各种理论和医法层出不穷。直到二十世纪初，顺势疗法，自然疗法，水疗法，甚至放血疗法，仍深入人心，占据相当大的市场。

直到洛氏挥金、政客控局、学者出头，才于二十世纪中叶医统天下，奠定了以对症治疗为主打的现代美国医学的制度和格局。

全文不长，节选如下

Living life day to day it is easy to forget that ideas can change the world sometimes much faster and more profoundly than we expect. Before the Civil War, for example, John D. Rockefeller was just a boy and his father “Big Bill” Rockefeller was a quack physician selling bottles of creosote to cancer patients for 25 dollars apiece. The family, as might be expected, moved frequently.

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Before it was standardized, American medicine was home to a half a dozen competing philosophies and approaches. They were in open conflict with each other their practitioners routinely savaged others for their bungling and mistakes. Critics of “regular” physicians continue to cite the ill-treatment of “the Father of our Nation” as a reason to fear conventional medicine. “When George Washington lay dying, the country’s best physicians, from Harvard and Yale, proceeded to kill him by draining 3 QUARTS of blood, giving him several doses of Calomel (mercury sub-chloride) and covering his body with blisters.” Despite their obvious, and fearsome, ineffectiveness, the practice of the “regular” physician was the foundation upon which Rockefeller decided to build a new American medicine would be the foundation on which the standard medical practice would be built.

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Once relieved of its formerly beloved purgatives, leeches and lances, allopathy proved itself to be quite effective in addressing illnesses and injuries. It has given us laser eye surgery, titanium prosthetic hips, Viagra, heart transplants, cancer chemotherapy, Vioxx, insulin, the polio vaccine, Rogaine, coronary artery bypass surgery, MRIs and Thalidomide. Allopathy has proven both its power and the damage it can do when used less than skillfully. It deserves the central role it now plays in our health care system but, in 1910, it was just one of many different approaches to health and healing.

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Even Mark Twain felt compelled to weigh in on the issue of Homeopathy. Quoted in Harpers Magazine in 1890, he vouched for homeopathy and tweaked the nose of the medical establishment. “The introduction of homeopathy forced the old school doctor to stir around and learn something of a rational nature about his business.” Despite a concerted (many would call it vengeful) campaign to destroy homeopathy, it continued to grow. By 1900 there were 22 homeopathic medical schools giving this discipline a respectable share of all the medical colleges operating at that time. Then came Flexner. In 1923 only two of these schools remained in operation. By 1950 no homeopathic colleges remained in the U.S.

The battle had been joined, a standard imposed and medical education in America was, on the whole, vastly improved. Even though much was gained we should not lose sight of what was lost. Alternative and, potentially, complementary systems of medical thought are important to our health care system in the same way that a diversity of species strengthens an ecosystem. The extinction of a bird or mammal is a loss, profound and enduring. The approaches that were eliminated during the rise of allopathy (and others that have developed since then) can, as Twain pointed out, make the existing system better.

It is time to let Doc Rockefeller rest in peace and begin exploring a new broader scope of health and healing. There are and always have been multiple legitimate approaches to the problem of alleviating human suffering.

Monopoly is bad Medicine.

后注：该文不代表本人观点