[The miraculous effects of taking laxatives. Success and failure of pre-modern medical treatment from the patients' perspective].
The massive use of laxatives, emetics and blood-letting in pre-modern medicine has often intrigued historians. Why did generations of prominent and often quite empirically minded physicians resort to methods which, in hindsight, were usually much more likely to do harm than good? And why did the patients not rebel?Based on patients' personal documents and, in particular, on the letter consultations many of them wrote ot renowned early modern physicians, this essay traces, how the sick and their relatives experienced and responded to this kind of treatment. These sources provide ample evidence, first of al, that early modern lay-men not only accepted evacuative treatment with laxatives and the like but often explicitly demanded it. To them these methods seemed plausible and indispensable in the light of their notions of disease causation. For diseases were generally though to result no so much from an imbalance of humours or qualities (as is often believed) but from a specific, impure, morbific matter which had to be expelled. And patients frequently felt better or even totally cured immediately after taking a drastic laxative. In hindsight, we may attribute this to a placebo effect or the self-limiting nature of most disease episodes. But in the patients' experience the efficacy of evacuative treatment was thus constantly reconfirmed. Indeed, the very physical perception of curative effects was already shaped by their deeply embodied belief in the predominantly humoural nature of human physiology and pathology, increasing the likelihood of placebo effects from treatment that occasioned a marked, clearing visible evacuation. Therapeutic failure, on the other hand, was a common experience, too, but it could easily be explained on a case to the case basis, as a result of divine will or, more commonly, of the physician's incompetence. Presumably he had not chose the right evacuative treatment or drug, which was adequate in the specific case and another physician with a slightly different approach might well have more luck. The beneficial effects of evacuative treatment as such, however, were not called into question. Treatment with laxatives, emetics and blood-letting thus became obsolete very gradually only, in the nineteenth century, when new, more solidistic body concepts started to prevail also among the population.
Stolberg
Michael
M
D001815:Bloodletting / Q000266:history*; D002400:Cathartics / Q000266:history*; D005060:Europe; D049670:History, 17th Century; D049671:History, 18th Century; D049672:History, 19th Century; D010361:Patients / Q000266:history*; D013812:Therapeutics / Q000266:history*
D002400:Cathartics