THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

In Age of Chained Books, when a quote from a book was a precious morsel and a wealthy college at Oxford might have as many as twenty books chained to the wall and a full time Librarian to watch them, a precious quote from a Book was everything.

In the Google Age, we are at the opposite extreme.

But I have never seen anyone mention this, much less analyze it.

And analysis of reality is what Mantra Thinking is all about.

Our whole medial history, for example, has been the story of going from the worship of Chained Books like that of Galen, who said in the second century that the best thing you could do for somebody with pneumonia, as was done to George Washington in December, 1799, was to take a couple of quarts of blood out of him.

The combined result of all these bleedings is hard to calculate. Poor people who were starved for vitamins would get sick and the barber would do the bleeding. It was prescribed by physicians who had seen Galen's Book, but it was such an icky business that, unless the patient was very Uppah Clahss, they turned bleeding and surgery over the barbers.

Doing was for the peasants, Books were for the Doctors of Medicine.

Which, by the way, is why the term "doctor" has changed. Doceo, docere, means "to teach" in Latin, and was revolutionary when Doctors of Medicine became practitioners.

It required a Doctor of Medicine to cast your horoscope in medical terms. Instead of looking at your body for symptoms, he literally looked to the sky. A medical horoscope was reserved for the Doctors, and they only ordered the bleeding and mixtures of smashed snails and particular types of dung for you to swallow.

The ban on dissecting bodies was not, as they like to say today, just a matter of church doctrine. It was looked on as filthy and beneath the station of Doctors of Medicine.

Medicine in the Chained Book Age had lots of what passed for clean hands and lots of corpses.

The cause of death in the white world is not really new.