THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

When the Plague hit Europe, they did exactly what they do today. A plague victim would cough up blood. Blood would be in their urine and come out of their noses.

So they were bled.

What do Europeans, including the Northeast, Canada, Australia and the like, have an incident where a nut fires on an UNARMED crowd, killing as many as he likes, what do Europeans do?

They punish themselves by making sure that no one in the unarmed crowd is armed.

We all know about the Flagellants, who tried to end the plague by doing more of what didn't work. The Church said the plague was the result of Sin, so they did what an Idealist today would do; they whipped themselves bloody through hundreds of miles.

None of this is new, and I get restless every time I hear someone talking about Traditional Values. One seemingly intelligent email writer said in passing that I was a "conservative," clearly not realizing what a nasty insult that was.

Conservatives want to oppose the present regime based on sick guilt and get back to an older regime based on sick guilt. When someone sees how silly this is I'll be waiting out in the hall.

Then the retarded turkeys talk about the Renaissance. Then they talk how silly the doctors were. But the doctors were silly BECAUSE they stuck to the books the Renaissance was supposed to have got Enlightenment from. They bled plague victims because Galen said to.

Modern medicine did not come from the Arabs, as people who think they know history say. It came from US.

The germ theory of disease was well developed among Europeans in the seventeenth century, but had not been thought of by any other group of doctors. John Astruc, physician to Louis XIV, expressed he official reaction to it:

"There are some, however, whom I forbear now to spend Time in imputing, such as Augustus Hauptman and Christian Langius, who think that the Venereal Poison is nothing else but a numerous School of little nimble, brisk, invisible living things, of a very prolific Nature, which when once admitted, increase and multiply in Abundance: which lead frequent Colonies to different Parts of the Body and inflame, erode, and

But as these are mere visionary imaginations, unsupported by any Authority, they do not require any argument to invalidate them...if it was once admitted, that the Venereal Disease could be produced by invisible living things swimming in the blood, one might with equal reason alledge the same Thing, not only of the Plague, as Athanasius Kircher, the Jesuit, formerly, and John Saguens, a Minim, lately have done but also in the smallpox, Hydrophobia, Itch, Tetters, and other contagious Diseases and indeed of all Distemper whatsoever; and thus the whole Theory of Medicine would fall to the Ground, as nothing could be said to prove the Venereal Disease depending upon little living things which might not be urged to prove that all other Diseases were derived from the like little living things though of a different species, than which nothing can be more absurd."

Look at the list of doctors, cited merely as examples, who were for the germ theory and who knew bleeding was stupid, two hundred years before Lister or Koch were supposed to have been the first to even imagine such a thing.

The only Authority who could have made a different was Galen or one of the other Glorious Renaissance writers Mommy Professor still insists brought the Wisdom of Mankind to the West.

Every part of modernity that works was probably as general as germ theory. But the above quote is from a 1928 history of medicine. You will see it nowhere else.