In article , William
Hamblen wrote:

On Tue, 28 Sep 2004 19:28:07 -0400, Howard Berkowitz
wrote:

Today's miracle is tomorrow's routine, and perhaps obsolescent the day
after. We don't always have cures -- but we increasingly have reliable
methods to turn death sentences into manageable chronic diseases with
good quality of life--and tough financial choices.

I've got a copy of the 1940 edition of the "Merck Manual". It was a
different world then. Sulfa was brand new and the only antimicrobials
with any track record were Paul Ehrlich's Salvarsan and similar
arsenic compounds for treating syphilis. The tragedy of Massengill's
Sulfanilamide Elixir, which used toxic ethylene glycol to dissolve the
drug, was fresh news. My own father was run over by a dairy wagon as
a small child and had a compound fracture of his right arm. The
doctor wanted to amputate immediately as it was a dirty wound and
bound to become septic. My great-grandmother refused to let it
happen. They irrigated the wound continuously with Dakin's solution,
an antiseptic solution of sodium hypochlorite and boric acid, and it
healed. My grandfather nicked his thumb whittling a toy for one of
his children. The thumb became infected and eventually part of it had
to be amputated. He was sick for months.


I cherish a 1934 textbook called "Modern Office and General Practice."
It's fascinating to read since almost EVERYTHING in it is wrong.

But for that matter, I tend to keep old editions of "modern" medical
textbooks. Ironically, the oldest edition I have of Goodman & Gilman's
_The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics_ is the fifth edition
(1970-something), and they are already saying to look in the fourth
edition for obsolete drugs like barbiturates.