vincent lam bloodletting and miraculous cures

Much more than recommendations about dietary intake, this involved conversations about “lifestyle” management in general: exercise, fresh air, habit changes, and perhaps bathing in mineral waters or spas. Although leeching, emetics, or purgatives might be prescribed, “dietetics” was the core of the treatment. When they arrived at a diagnosis (say, an excess of yellow or black bile, or of blood or phlegm), they would educate the patient about it and discuss possible approaches. They carefully looked for any clinically pertinent signs, and might physically examine the patient or his excretions. They also asked questions about his physical and social environment.

They began with careful histories of the patient’s complaints and his or her daily life course, customary activities, typical foods and beverages imbibed, and the exacerbation or relief of symptoms associated with any or all of these. physicians diagnosed diatheses in terms of humoral excesses or deficiencies, their primary emphasis was on the ill person. Before addressing the importance of Adolf Meyer and the question of his impact on the biopsychosocial model of the psychoanalytical internist George Engel, let us tersely sketch the history of functionalism in medicine/psychiatry, and of the nineteenth/early twentieth century’s progressive abandonment of it in favor of basic science reductive models of “disease,” not illness.

Vincent lam bloodletting and miraculous cures