“Regular” Medicine

myth of: “The basic presupposition of ‘regular medicine’ itself poses problems. What many physicians from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment were pleased to call ‘medical truth’ was itself a ramshackle edifice of internally inconsistent Classical learning, strengthened or weakened, by later accretions. The assertion of the existence of some pure, perfect and pristine medical truth-system was itself largely an ideological construct, a myth advanced by a medical profession that was itself not an age-old, adamantine institution but a relatively new body attempting to establish corporate existence and privileges” (Porter, Intro). [Porter indulges in polemical overstatement. “Regular medicine,” right through the Civil War, did indeed sustain a multiplicity of treatment approaches and remedies, but the theoretical system shared by trained physicians was always squarely Galenic, revolving around the notion of humoral imbalance and the need to restore balance. This was the essence of “regular medicine,” not the plethora of contradictory treatment approaches that could be undertaken to restore humoral balance. See, for example, Evans & Reed, on the nature of the imbalances ascribed with specific symptoms and illnesses. Later accretions to Galen (e.g., Avicenna) did not alter the underlying humoral assumptions of the model – PES].