He sat in stink
Broken hearted
He strained to think
And only farted!
A brain fart is a sound
signifying nothing. It is an argument that holds less water than an
old man with prostate glands the size of grapefruits. Too often what
passes for a person’s thought is whatever that person can grunt
out. It is no wonder that so much thinking takes place in the
outhouse. The Sears catalog was resting in Jeb’s lap. It was
collecting the sweat from his bare thighs. The heat increased the
stench of what had passed for knowledge not so long ago. He removed
a page from the catalog and used it to clean himself before pulling
up his trousers.
The sun hit him full in
the face when he stepped outside. He turned and closed the door of
the outhouse. “The Epistemology of Scatology,” how is that for a
title? It is not what we think that gets us into trouble; rather it
is what we believe. Thoughts become malleable whereas beliefs become
rigid and unyielding. Belief in the theory of humors caused doctors
to use purging and bleeding to kill more patients than they cured.
The Hippocratic oath as practiced is not to do no harm; rather it is
to do no intentional harm. People want to be cured. They expect
doctors to do something, and the doctors oblige them. The problem is
that what is logical is not always factual and what is factual often
defies what we have accepted as being most logical. Once a theory is
accepted we play hell trying to change it. This is where
epistemology comes into play: What do we know and how do we know it?
It is also where scatology comes in. It takes a discerning nose to
recognize as crap some of the things we accept as knowledge. The
worst brain farts are the arguments we use to justify rejecting out
of hand any observation or experiment that refutes accepted theories
or beliefs. Jeb called such rejections stupid. Ignorance is curable
because willing students can learn. Stupidity is forever because
stupid students refuse to learn. In a very real sense we are all
students. There are always new things to learn as well as theories
and beliefs that need to be changed or replaced.
Jeb was thinking of
writing a paper on those subjects because people had started calling
him the do nothing doctor. It all stemmed from his refusal to bleed
and purge his patients. The evidence, however, was overwhelming.
The experiments of Louis Pasteur proved the germ theory. It was
germs that caused illness rather than an imbalance of humors. Jeb
even went beyond saying there was no reason to bleed or purge. He
said that excessive bleeding and purging were actually deadly. He
came to this conclusion when he saw soldiers bleed to death during
the Civil War and when he saw how weak severe cases of diarrhea made
the soldiers he was treating. Of course, he had to admit that the
weakness could be due to the germs causing the diarrhea rather than
the diarrhea per se. But if you are going to do no harm you have to
reject ineffective treatments that might be harmful. The germ theory
was further bolstered by the observation that soldiers in clean camps
suffered fewer illnesses than soldiers in dirty camps. Sanitary
commissions were even set up to keep the camps clean.
Why the doctors did not
extrapolate and start washing their hands was a brain fart of the
first order. Ignorance about the germ theory was no excuse, the
connection between filth and disease should have told them to keep
their hands clean. It had been years since the Civil War, and
doctors still had not learned that lesson. Jeb’s criticism of
doctors who did not wash their hands made him unpopular with his
fellow physicians, and his patients did not take kindly to him
telling them to clean their houses. The only thing that saved his
practice was the fact that everyone acknowledged him as the most
talented surgeon in the region. As one of Jeb’s fellow surgeons
said: “Jeb is an eccentric cuss, but he’s the surgeon other
cutters would choose to carve on them.”
Jeb had just finished a
difficult surgery. It was six o’clock on a Wednesday night. A
revival meeting was being held at place he had to pass on his way home.
He paused there to watch and listen. The evangelist was a charlatan
faith healer who had placed shills in the audience to fake ailments
and miraculous cures. Jeb shook his head and resumed his journey.
Some day we’ll be able to identify more of the germs and kill them
without harming the patents, he thought. Until then people will rely
on God and will insist on doctors doing something even if what the
doctors are doing is wrong. As long as there are things we cannot
cure thought will always have to stand in line behind faith. People
who flagellated themselves to atone for the world’s sins were
considered heroes during the black plague. We may have learned a lot
about our relationship with the physical world since then, but our
instincts have not changed much. We still take our mortality too
personally to be rational about it.
First published in macsbackporch.foxtail-farms.com on Jun 15, 2010
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