Doc Gurley

Have you ever joined a group of people and then been appalled by them? What I mean is a love-hate kind of thing, kind of like the way some people feel about their relatives. Maybe you (like some of us) grew up in the kind of family where silent, protracted struggles are enacted over chairs that are dragged squealing back and forth across wooden floors, all because no one wants to sit next to the toupee-wearing, nose-picking, crotch-fondling (yes, all at the same time) uncle. You don’t really have much choice about joining the family group—it was a means to an end (life). But then, somewhere around your tenth birthday, maybe you realized that not all families have a fight over who’s going to sit where during Sunday dinner. Or, if that wasn’t your family, maybe there’s something in the past. Maybe you get all excited about genealogy, but when you go digging around, you find out that your executed ancestors had a too-intimate knowledge of sheep.

See the problem, once you know this kind of information, is that you can ‘t change it. All you can do is wish you never looked.

That’s how I feel about the medical profession. I love it. I hate it. I cringe about the things it does, and the things it did.

The latest cringe-worthy addition to my group’s collective ancestor-behavior is found at this site, where you can see a little visual  fact about the practice of medicine from the 17th to early 19th centuries:

Yes, folks, we doctors used to try to resuscitate people by, literally, blowing smoke up their ass.

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