Imagine a time when the American medical establishment was disinterested in science, with patients dying because doctors were hamstrung by misguided, deadly hospital protocols. In callous disregard to available facts, these administrators – self-assured in their intellectual superiority – watched while life-saving treatments were left untried, or worse, banned; the doctors who promoted those life-saving treatments, vilified.
If all of this sounds familiar, it should.
The Covid-19 protocols, set forth by the medical establishment, are as a command from on high. But there is a massive, growing movement among physicians fighting those administrators and advocating for alternative treatments. This is not a new phenomenon. The exact same scenario has played out across history and was once instrumental in the murder of a president of the United States.
President James Garfield didn’t make much of a splash in the history books. Like John Tyler or Franklin Pierce, he might have been forgotten entirely except for the fact that he’s included in the exclusive club of presidents assassinated in office.
But James Garfield didn’t die because he was assassinated. He was killed by the ineptitude and arrogance of the American medical establishment, embodied in Dr. D. Willard Bliss and over the strenuous objections of other doctors. Dr. Charles Purvis, Dr. Susan Ann Edson, and even Garfield’s personal physician, Dr. Jedediah Hyde Baxter all lobbied for alternative, less invasive treatment. For months after the shooting, Bliss repeatedly probed for the bullet, disregarding the science of antisepsis and the life-saving lessons of countless cases in America and Europe.
In 1881, people the world over functioned perfectly well with bullets lodged inside their bodies. Civil War era bullets were not always deadly. If these lead slugs didn’t sever a major artery or puncture an organ, they could encase themselves quite nicely within protective scar tissue. Had Garfield’s bullet (lodged harmlessly behind his pancreas) been left alone, he would have made a full recovery in a matter of weeks. Unfortunately for him and for history, pompous medical authorities cared less about the science of his care then they did about the erroneous dictates of foolhardy medical boards that banned antiseptic measures despite their universal effectiveness.
But probe his wounds Garfield’s doctors did, even using fingers and soiled rags. They introduced so much bacteria and caused so much additional trauma that he would die months later of a massive infection. There were many doctors who knew better, and some of them were even at Garfield’s side – but it didn’t matter. They were threatened into silent submission by powerful people. Their reputations, perhaps even their medical licenses were on the line if they opened their mouths in protest.
Some things never change.
The fascinating thing about the human body is that it has this miraculous ability to largely heal itself, so long as you don’t overwhelm it with unnecessary and harmful interventions. In the case of James Garfield, those unnecessary interventions included shoving dirty, unsterilized instruments into an open bullet wound and probing for hours to locate the bullet. Sometimes it’s foolish medicine that poses the greater threat. Today this medical malpractice exists in the form of denying safe, cheap, effective, and (formerly) universally available drugs. In 1881, the inevitable outcome of such shoddy medicine was well known in Europe thanks to the groundbreaking work of Joseph Lister, pioneer in the field of antisepsis and instrument sterilization. Ignorance of these methods was no defense since Lister had presented ten years’ worth of data to the American medical establishment only five years prior. His scientific findings were ridiculed, his patient success rates ignored, and the most influential scholarly minds in America wrote it off as medical misinformation.
“In the midst of arrogance, distrust, and misunderstanding that characterized the American medical establishment’s attitude toward Lister’s theories, there was a small but growing bastion of doctors who understood the importance of practicing antisepsis, not halfheartedly but precisely.”
Candice Millard, The Destiny of the Republic.
The medical establishment called the shots. James Garfield died.
In some respects, we’ve come a long way since 1881. We’re now able to draw on 140 years of medical history to ascertain the best possible treatment against any affliction – unless that treatment goes against the medical establishments dictates. Doctors now, like doctors then, face institutional persecution for daring to practice medicine and advocating for their patients. In 1881 there were men and women crying foul. They were written off as kooks, crackpots, or dangerous.
“I had a taste of what has been, alas! experienced so largely by our profession, how ignorant prejudice with good intentions may obstruct legitimate scientific inquiry.” – Joseph Lister
Pasteur and Lister, Germ Theory And Its Applications to Medicine, 1878.
In the modern era we like to believe we’re informed by history, science, and truth, but that’s simply not the case. More often than not, we’re informed by the media, social media, or government officials who have no foundation in history, no respect for science, and zero interest in truth.
In October of 2021, a number of medical professionals gathered to discuss best practices for treating Covid 19. Presenters included Dr. Richard Urso, Dr. Li-Meng Yan, Dr. John Nolte, Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Ryan Cole, Dr. Meryl Nass, and several others. First to speak was Ilona Farr, a local family practitioner who, through trial and error in treating patients, eventually came to an understanding about the disease and has since treated 700 patients, only 20 of which were hospitalized and only one who died. The one who died did so because Providence Hospital (the largest in the state) refused to give her Ivermectin against Dr.Farr’s explicit and emphatic instruction.
The medical establishment called the shots. Dr. Farr’s patient died.
Now, two weeks later, the medical establishment has its sights set on the doctors who attended the summit, threatening to strip them of their medical licenses for daring to practice medicine:
“Science and reason flourish in an environment where questioning and open discourse are allowed and encouraged, not where those who question the status quo are censored and vilified…Our own good doctors are now under attack from the establishment doctors who are attempting to take medical licenses away through the Alaska Medical Board. These providers promote the current so called ‘best practices’ that leave few options other than Covid vaccines and if sick enough, hospitalization, Remdesivir (which only works in the first phase of the disease) and placing the seriously ill on ventilators…And now, just two weeks later, Dr. Farr and her colleagues who provided information on preventive vitamin therapy and early treatment, to include the use of Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, are under a direct attack by the medical establishment.”
Alaska Covid Alliance
The free exchange of ideas is integral to good science and good medicine, and the fact that someone would seek to censor doctors sharing first-hand experiences and relevant case data is deadly to the health and well-being of a society. The medically irrational, historically ignorant, and unscientific persecution of the doctors and medical professionals must end. As Garfield’s doctors, Joseph Lister, and now Dr. Ilona Farr know, in the long history of medical misinformation it has always been the individuals stymieing public discourse who were guilty of the greater crime.
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Featured image: U.S. President Garfield’s casket lying in state at the Capitol Rotunda. Library of Congress: c1881.