What distinguishes science from pseudo-science?
Why is confirmation bias so hard to overcome?
How is it that so many great scientists in history were labeled heretics?
And why have so many crank theories been empowered and killed millions of people?
The next time I teach philosophy of science, this “Scientific Heresy” talk by Matt Ridley will be on the reading list.
Franz Schubert was a great lyrical composer of the early nineteenth century. He died at the relatively young age of 31, and while his music is usually too melancholy for my taste, what a sadness.
Franz was lucky to get that many years. Biographer Christoper Gibbs reports that Schubert’s parents had fourteen children and “nine of their fourteen children died in infancy.” That’s from The Life of Schubert (Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 23).
The death rate for infants was appallingly high before the twentieth century, as it was even for those who survived to adulthood.
Why were the Greeks the first to put medicine on a scientific footing? Alcmaeon (fl. 470 BCE) and Hippocrates (ca. 460 – ca. 370 BCE) were giants in the field, and Hippocrates at least has become a household name.
“This separation of medicine from religion points to another distinctive feature of Greek healing: its openness, a quality characteristic of Greek intellectual activity at large, which it owned to political diversity and cultural pluralism. In the constellation of city states dotting the mainland and the Aegean islands, healing was practiced in the public sphere, and interacted with other mental pursuits. There was no imperial Hammurabic Code and, unlike Egypt, no state medical bureaucracy, nor were there examinations or professional qualifications. Those calling themselves doctors (iatroi) had to compete with bone-setters, exorcists, root-cutters, incantatory priests, gymnasts and showmen, exposed to the quips of playwrights and the criticism of philosophers. Medicine was open to all (as later in Rome, slaves sometimes practised medicine)” (pp. 53-54).
A little later, Porter continues:
“What is clear is that in classical Greece philosophical speculations about nature became enmeshed in dialogue with medical beliefs about sickness and health; dialogue and debate were integral to Greek intellectual life. Unlike healing in the Near East, elite Greek medicine was not a closed priestly system: it was open to varied influences and accessible to outsiders, guaranteeing its flexibility and vitality.
“This openness followed from the fact that Greek civilization developed in multiple centres from Asia Minor to Sicily, and no single sect of doctors possessed a state or professional monopoly, Athens was the first city to support a fair number of full-time healers making a livelihood out of fees, and, according to his younger contemporary Plato (427-347 BC), the great Hippocrates taught all who were prepared to pay” (p. 55).
So there we have it: the profit motive combined with intellectual, economic, and political freedom. Let there be a lesson in that.
“The greatest obstacle to discovery,” argues Barry Marshall, quoting historian Daniel Boorstin, “is not ignorance—it is the illusion of knowledge.”
Marshall is the co-discoverer of Helicobacter pylori, the bacterium that causes stomach ulcers, for which he won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
But his hypothesis initially met with great resistance from the medical establishment, which was strongly committed to the belief that ulcers were caused by acids from poor diets or stress. And at that time Marshall was a young faculty member, so his prospects for getting a research grant for his wild hypothesis were non-existent.
‘The solution? “The short-cut through that problem was just to do a human experiment,” Marshall says. “But if I had put in a proposal, everybody would have said ‘Here’s this junior guy doing eccentric research in our hospital. Are we going to let him give these bacteria to medical students or other people?’ I would have gotten nowhere.”
‘To Marshall, his next move was clear. Without informing his family — “It’s a lot easier to obtain forgiveness than permission,” he quips — Marshall drank a Petri dish full of H. pylori extracted from a patient suffering from gastric ulceration. “Well, here it goes, down the hatch,” is what he recalls saying before drinking. His lab technicians were horrified.
‘As he had hoped and expected, Marshall soon developed painful gastritis. He endured two weeks of vomiting, appetite loss, and halitosis (bad breath can be a marker of H. pylori infection), during which time two endoscopies confirmed both his infection and the ulcerative damage to his stomach mucosa. “So, great experiment!” exclaims Marshall, with his trademark devil-may-care exuberance.
‘A confession to his wife — and a course of antibiotics — eventually set everything right.”
Great story.
Dr. Marshall’s primary position currently is with the University of Western Australia, though he also holds positions at Pennsylvania State University and the University of Virginia.
From Part 3 of Stephen Hicks’s Philosophy of Education course, in which he discusses Ignaz Semmelweis’s discovery of the cause of puerperal fever, with special focus on the cognitive methods Semmelweis used.
Syphilis is thought to have been brought back from America by Christopher Columbus’s fellow travelers. In Europe, it first manifested in Naples and so came to be called “the disease of Naples,” though most Italians came to call it the “French Pox.”
As it made its way across Europe and then Asia, syphilis acquired a variety of ethnically … ummm … sensitive names. As Roy Porter tells it, syphilis was called “the Spanish disease in Holland, the Polish disease in Russia, the Russian disease in Siberia, the Christian disease in Turkey and the Portuguese disease in India and Japan.” The Portuguese called it the “Castilian disease,” and when it made its way all the way to Tahiti, the natives called it the “British disease.”
What do all of these hostile labels imply for harmony between nations and peace for all mankind, given that syphilis “began with genital sores, progressing to a general rash, to ulceration, and to revolting abscesses eating into bones and destroying the nose, lips and genitals, and often proving fatal”?
Why accurate translation and skilled editing are important:
Bloodletting was a common practice in medieval medicine and did not die out until the nineteenth century.
The practice was encouraged by the belief that the excellent Greek physicians Hippocrates and Galen practiced it. Most phelobotomists followed the Persian genius Avicenna’s editions of the Greek texts, which stated that the bloodletting was to be administered from the side of the body opposite to the disease’s location.
Along came Pierre Brissot (1478-1522), whose reading of the Greek texts argued that the bloodletting was to be carried out on the same side as the illness.
Huge controversy among the phlebotomists! Same side or opposite? This text or that?
The “revulsive” bleeders (opposite side) asked by what right upstarts like Brissot challenged the centuries-old interpretations. The “derivative” bleeders (same side) wondered through what incompetence the original texts were altered.
Name-calling ensued, much of it in the name of the infallibility of the Greeks. Noted Jacobus Sylvius (1478-1555) of Hippocrates and Galen: “they had never written anything in physiology or other parts of medicine that was not entirely true.”
Still, the improved attention to the Greek texts did increase the accuracy of editing and translation and the bitter arguing sharpened logical skills and forced some experimenting.
[The image is Hans von Gersdorff's (ca. 1455-1529) illustration of the appropriate places for phlebotomists to practice their art.]
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The next time I teach philosophy of science, this “Scientific Heresy” talk by Matt Ridley will be on the reading list. 
From Part 3 of Stephen Hicks’s 
