Somewhere in the basement beneath the Hall of Fame there is a dusty broom cupboard reserved for those who have championed history's greatest medical errors. Here are remembered those often well meaning and frequently hard working souls who have committed their lives to pushing medical progress in completely the wrong direction.
Some might suggest that damaging public faith in a safe and highly effective vaccine against childhood diseases would guarantee a future place. But space is at a premium, since the past can already furnish numerous examples of pioneers who have singlehandedly set back the course of medicine.
Perhaps the most reckless was Max von Pettenkofer, who in 1892 drank a broth containing excrement from a patient who had died from cholera in a foolhardy bid to prove the disease was not carried in water. Declaring that if he died, “I should die in the cause of science, like a soldier on the field of honour,” he survived—though not with honour.
Others who have contributed hugely to medicine have occasionally erred in the wrong direction too. Florence Nightingale and Edwin Chadwick can be forgiven their support for the miasma theory—that disease spread in bad air—on account of their sterling contributions to public health.
But by far the largest space in the cupboard is reserved for Claudius Galen, physician to the Roman emperors, whose advocacy of bloodletting held sway for an incredible 1700 years. Born in Pergamon, in the Greek speaking part of the Roman Empire in AD 129, Galen studied medicine in Alexandria before attaining imperial advancement in Rome.
A brilliant self publicist, who staged public demonstrations in which he silenced a squealing pig by severing its spinal cord, Galen popularised the Hippocratic theory that all illness resulted from an imbalance in the four bodily humours. Letting blood at specific points was his favourite remedy for restoring balance; he once denounced a quack for letting blood from the “wrong arm.”
His daily dissections of apes, pigs, and sheep led him to numerous mistaken conclusions on the human body, which remained unchallenged until the 16th century.
Yet Galen silenced his critics as effectively as he stifled the pigs by the sheer volume of his writings, publishing more than 130 treatises.
Many of Galen's teachings were eminently sensible. Yet his undoubted contributions have been far outweighed by the endurance of his belief in bloodletting, which—like so many false ideas—enjoyed huge public acclaim.
If not offered bloodletting, many patients demanded it until well into the 19th century. Samuel Johnson recommended being bled till the point of fainting, surgeon Benjamin Rush is thought to have killed George Washington with his enthusiastic phlebotomy, and Mrs Beeton even published instructions for self bleeding in an emergency. Poor Galen would have been aghast that medics ignored his overriding doctrine—to base diagnosis and treatment on reason supplemented by observation and experience—but his place in the broom cupboard is assured.