Even though there are many mistakes in modern medicine, how many diseases and treatments it was believed in the past?

by wellcome collection

The history of medical diagnosis and treatment of disease can be traced back to ancient Egypt and Babylonia in BC. However, until the 18th - 19th century established by modern medicine most private therapies based on superstition and tradition were mostly used, and from the perspective of modern medicine the wrong disease definition and treatment were adopted. What kind of errors were widely recognized in old medicine "is summarized by Science alert of science media.

The Weird History of Diseases Which All Turned Out to Be Totally Wrong
https://www.sciencealert.com/abandoned-historical-diseases-hysteria-nostalgia-drapetomania-unwell

· Nervous breakdown
"Neurasthenia" advocated by American neurologists in the second half of the 19th century was thought to be caused by overwork fatigue caused by consumption of central nervous system energy. The treatment of nerve weakness at that time was to go out to camping and to keep it in the darkroom. For example, Theodore Roosevelt, who served as the 26th president of the United States, is said to have been diagnosed with nervous weakness after being defeated in the presidential election of 1912, and was proposed to explore the Amazon River basin by doctor's advice .

"Nervous weakness" has been accepted as a mental disorder until the beginning of the 20th century, but since the concept was too ambiguous, it became unusable little by little in the medical field from the 1930s, and in modern Europe and Japan " It is rare that a diagnosis of "nervous breakdown" will be given. Nevertheless, the name of nervous breakdown is posted in " International Statistical Classification of Disease and Related Health Problems ( ICD - 10)" published by the World Health Organization (WHO).

· Nostalgia "Nostalgia" is translated as "nostalgia" in Japanese, it is used as a word expressing the feelings of recollecting the far past past memories of nostalgic homes from faraway foreign countries. However, originally "nostalgia" was one of the words pointing to sickness.

Johannes Hofer who was a medical student in Switzerland in the late 17th century pointed out that some Swiss mercenaries who fought away from their hometown showed symptoms such as depression, emotional instability and anorexia. I named the symptoms appearing in Swiss mercenaries as "nostalgia (nostalgia)" in combination with nostos (hometown) + algos (pain). In the 19th century French medicine book, two cases where patients died due to nostalgia are introduced. One of them said that "I just cherish my parents' house, caused despair when I left my parents house, causing breathing difficulty." Of course, in modern times it is not treated as a disease.

· Hysteria "Hysteria" was originally a Greek word meaning "uterus". In ancient Greece where the role of the brain and nerve was not yet known, it was thought that women's uterus move around in the body causing various symptoms. Also, the superstition that emotional instability such as laughing and crying suddenly and suffering of suffocation feeling / feeling all originate from women's pelvis has long been believed until about the 19th century.

As a treatment, methods such as massage and water pressure to eliminate female sexual desire or prescribing herbs were adopted. However, as these treatments were practiced without medical grounds in particular, there were many cases where hysteria deteriorated in many cases. In the present age, hysteria is known as "excitement caused by collapse of hormonal balance", and in ICD - 10 it is summarized in " disability to physical disorder ".

· Anemia <br> "Anemia" is caused by a decrease in hemoglobin concentration and red blood cell count in the blood, resulting in a drop in the oxygen carrying capacity of blood and sudden fatigue. There are various reasons for the decrease in hemoglobin concentration, but the most is the lack of iron. Hemoglobin is a combination of " heme " which carries bivalent iron atom and protein, and it becomes impossible to biosynthesize hemoglobin if iron is insufficient in the body.

Women regularly cause bleeding due to menstruation, but at that time they also emit iron in the body. As a result, women are more likely to have relatively " iron deficiency anemia " than men, and from this, they were called "anemia is a disease of women" in the past. And before the 17th century where there was no concept of nutrition, it was thought that "pregnancy" is a treatment method. Of course, this treatment is denied in modern times.

· Drapetomania
In the mid-nineteenth century American doctor Samuel Cartwright insisted that "the black who escapes from the hardship suffers from" black inherited psychotic peculiar to escape from obligation as a slave ". Furthermore, in order to treat psychosis he calls himself "Drapetomania", Cartwright announced a ridiculous paper at the conference to conclude that "a devil should go out of the patient as a devil goes out."

Naturally, there is no scientific basis in this paper, but the southern part of the United States where black slaves were commonplace was soon accepted, the Louisiana Medical Association recognized Drapetomania as psychosis. Drapetomania was recognized as enough to be published in American medical books until the beginning of the 20th century. Of course it is now completely denied, it goes without saying that it is only an indication of just discrimination consciousness.