Ancient wisdom often sounds like common sense now that it is commomly taught. What is some ancient wisdom that we no longer teach because it was wrong?
People back in the day had just as much terrible advice as we have today, it’s just that the only one that survived long enough to survive to the present day is the really good advice
But to answer the question, anything related to the ingestion of mercury
Was listening to an American history podcast (the dollop) about the radium girls. They wore uranium infused lipstick because it glowed and they thought it was cute. They licked their fingers regularly to help apply uranium dust to things.
While their male supervisors were wearing full lead suits totally for no reason and let those girls do that.
Many of them lost their jaws. There was a suit filed that they won, but every single one of those girls died before they could collect the money.
The suit led to a law establishing workers’ safety rights, so it wasn’t all bad. But that law was definitely written in those girls’ blood.
At least accordingly to this link, the trend for dial-painters was to be teenagers. Some started as early as their fourteens. It makes sense considering the 1920s, when adult women were expected to stay at home and take care of children, not to be part of the workforce. So odds are that “radium girls” is accurate, because most of them were not adult women.
Wikipedia, and the sources that Wikipedia is relying on, are also rather consistently calling them “Radium girls”. This is clearly a fixed expression, that shouldn’t be decomposed like you’re doing.
And even if we disregard both things above (we should not), your “small correction” boils down to “I’ll vomit an «ackshyually» to boss the other user around on language usage, disregarding what they say to whine about how they say it”. This is simply not contributive.
A decent amount of safety law was written in the blood or sweat of women. The origins of fire code come from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire which manufactured garments in New York which was staffed almost entirely by women.
Not to say a lot of safety law wasn’t developed because of the deaths of men but a bunch of women dying all at once due to negligence does seem to be a decently galvanizing force for society which makes it easier to get a ball rolling and women, particularly widows and family members of victims , have always been important advocates and organizers in the fight for safety legislation.
I think you got the right idea but that description is missing the big points.
They were painting watches and their employers told them to use their lips to make fine points on the brushes, meaning they ingested a ton of the paint. The employers told them it was harmless despite evidence to the contrary. They chose not to use other options because wiping the brush on their lips increased productivity and they were paid per watch.
I don’t think you meant to imply that they were doing it for trivial reasons, but I do think mentioning that they were doing it for a job and that their employers were intentionally deceiving them is important context!
Anything related to health care in general, really. Keep in mind that germ theory was only invented in the late 16th century, and it was ridiculed for centuries in favour of Miasma theory. It wasn't until the mid 19th century that it started gaining legitimacy.
it’s just that the only one that survived long enough to survive to the present day is the really good advice
Okay but... I thought that was basically the point, in that if the advice survived for that long, then it is worth paying attention to at least, to consider if it might apply to a particular situation? e.g. chicken soup really is good for a cold, whether we knew the precise reasons why or not.
I read Montaigne’s essays (written in the 1500’s) and while his views are remarkably modern in many ways, one thing that stuck out to me was how unabashedly elitist he is. The translation I had used the phrase “common herd” to refer to the large majority of people who failed to impress him due to their lack of education or strength of character. I hesitate to speak for him since I think he was a wiser man than I am, but I expect that our modern notions about democracy would have seemed ridiculous to him. He might accept that universal suffrage is in practice the least-bad option currently available to us, but he would argue that at least in principle it would be better to exclude people who don’t actually know how to run a country from the process of deciding how the country is to be run.
(He would also be unashamed to say that the life of an exceptional person is worth more than the life of someone ordinary, but we think that in the modern day too. We just consider it rude to be so explicit about it.)
Without knowing his works, I’d argue for him that he’s right to some extent towards an uneducated population, BUT the reason we have universal suffrage is that our founding fathers assumed that:
Everyone would be well-educated and make rational if not reasonable assumptions about politicians (eg, not elect morons who immediately try and sabotage the government, citizenry, and friends)
Politicians would serve as public servants and would be even better educated and would work hard to brush up on things so that the common man wouldn’t have to learn the ins and outs of complicated decisions in terms of complex trade agreements, city planning and zoning law, and universal medical systems that work across state lines.
Obviously, it didn’t quite go that way. But it’s why I’m such an advocate for good public schools and free education, because it pays itself back in spades when it comes to R&D/innovation and an informed populace who make the country and world a better place to live.
The founding fathers did not believe in universal suffrage; at the time only people who owned land could vote–to say nothing of even less privileged groups than that–and they were fine with that policy, in part because these were considered to be the people with the most skin in the game.
To be fair, our modern concept of democracy really is quite shitty and the only reason we use it is because it is better than anything else we came up with so far.
But generally the notion that the common person cannot be entrusted with politics holds true even if we find it distasteful. The average person is a fucking idiot and objectively not qualified to decide on political matters.
Compounding the problem, this environment rewards charlatans and sociopaths. There will always be some that will exploit a weak spot in the system, in bad faith, no matter what the system is.
Look into the death of George Washington. His doctor responded to what could have been a mild cold by taking a liter of blood 4 separate times from him. Washington very well could have recovered if he was just left alone.
Oh, and the doctor somewhat realized his mistake and tried to put some of the blood back after(!) Washington expired, with the logic that if blood loss killed him giving it back should revive him.
So yeah. Pumping blood back into a dead man. That was done on the founding president of the United States.
If you have hemochromatosis, and you get sick from it, you probably should be asking about bloodletting. Regular bloodletting is one of the most effective and cost-efficient treatment options available to reduce or prevent the myriad of complications caused by this health condition.
Unless you have excess swelling in specific parts of the body, like a cranial bleed, which does require letting out some blood to relieve pressure that can kill you. And leeches are used medically for relieving some types of swelling as well. Then there is maggots that can be used for infections to eat dead skin. All of those practices came from some specific medical treatments that did work for some specific types of injuries, although a few of them were overused for things that had nothing to do with why they existed in the first place which was counterproductive.
So while not asking for it is good advice, don't turn it down if an actual licensed medical doctor recommends them as a treatment that has been supported by evidence.
This is why I try to endure the fever side effects of vaccines as much as I can without taking a tylenol, so my immune system gets some proper “training” to recognize and fight the real thing.
Most forms of medical advice, some of it stuck around for a long ass time (bloodletting and the idea of spirits and humors lasted several millennia), but I imagine that the vast majority of it is lost to time.
You don't even have to go all that far back to see this in action.
In the 90's, the universal medical advice was to avoid fats, sauces and dear lord never eat more than 2-3 eggs in a week or you'll have a coronary before 40.
You still shouldn't go overboard with fats and sauce which is made with fat, but the advice that you shouldn't eat more than 2-3 eggs in a week is entirely defunct now.
You can eat 2-3 eggs a day (which many people do without even knowing as eggs are used in a whole lot of things) without any medical disadvantages.
After believing Dr. Gregor (the author of that site) for awhile, i don’t believe or trust him anymore. He’s a vegan and I think he’s set on a vegan mission despite him claiming he’s not.
You still shouldn’t go overboard with fats and sauce which is made with fat, but the advice that you shouldn’t eat more than 2-3 eggs in a week is entirely defunct now.
You can eat 2-3 eggs a day (which many people do without even knowing as eggs are used in a whole lot of things) without any medical disadvantages
The thing with cholesterol is still true though. What matters is, once a lot is fine (body can regulate that) but over a long time it is bad, promotes arteriosclerosis. So, no, the “without any medical disadvantages” bit is not true.
Anyone reading this thread and genuinely interested in it should go listen to the dollop podcast. It’s American history, mostly between the 1500’s and now. But the different episodes they do are stuffed full of this kind of faulty logic from the past.
Aristotle was obviously a great teacher and philosopher but he ended up being wrong about a lot. Like he thought the “elements” were earth, wind, fire, and water and that all objects want to be in their “natural” place. So, if you drop a rock, it tries to return to the earth. Fire goes up because it’s trying to get to where it “wants” to live.
He thought eels didn’t procreate because no one had ever seen it happening. (They go out to sea to fuck.) He was into bees and correctly noticed that there were workers and drones and that young bees grow out of the honeycomb. But he just assumed the Queen was a King and that worker bees were out collecting tiny baby bees from flowers. (He thought the air just blew pollen around and the honey naturally appeared.)
He had a lot of ideas that were just ideas but he was so influential and his writings were preserved and translated. It took a shocking number of years for people to question if Aristotle was full of shit.
Dude developed testable hypotheses thousands of years ago, not exactly like but very close to what we call the scientific method today. Full of shit? What an ignorant thing to say.
My boy Aristotle thought men had more teeth than women, and whatever testable hypothesis he created to prove that fact didn’t include, you know, counting the teeth of men and women.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the guy, and will agree that “classical elements” is probably the dumbest thing to accuse him of being wrong about. Hell, I have considered getting a Bekker number tattoo, but he was definitely full of some shit. It’s okay to acknowledge he was right about some things and wrong about others. That’s the whole point of this thread.
Like he thought the “elements” were earth, wind, fire, and water and that all objects want to be in their “natural” place. So, if you drop a rock, it tries to return to the earth. Fire goes up because it’s trying to get to where it “wants” to live.
That’s basically correct, though, as long as you’re intepreting “elements” to mean something more in linenwith “states of matter”, rather than actual fundamental periodic style elements.
“Element” is a fairly general word, we just generally use it colloquially to refer specifically to the chemical elements. If you interpret his usage in the same way we use “states of matter”, it’s not horrendously far off. Earth, water, air, and fire roughly correspond to solid, liquid, gas, and (extremely rudimentary, very low ionization) plasma (or perhaps a more general energetic concept). In any case, an object “wanting” to get to its “natural” place also isn’t terribly far off from a statement of consistent physical laws. Solids do “want” to accumulate with other solids by gravity, energetic gases do “want” to rise above less energetic ones through buoyancy.
The worst part of it was that for a ton of stuff he had contemporaries that were right about much much more, but were dismissed in favor of his confidently incorrect BS.
For example the Epicureans, who thought matter was made of tiny indivisible parts, that light too was made of indivisible parts moving really fast, that each parent contributed to a “doubled seed” which determined the traits of the child and could bring back features of skipped generations, that the animals which we see today were just the ones that were best able to survive to reproduce, and that all of existence arose only from the random interactions of these indivisible parts of matter and not from any intelligent design.
And because Aristotle’s stupid ideas influenced the lineage of modern thought, most people learn about him but very few learn about the other group that effectively preempted modern thought millennia earlier.
But he just assumed the Queen was a King
Actually, he acknowledged “some say” the Queen was female, but then argued it couldn’t be because the gods don’t give women weapons and it had a stinger. And the identification of the leader of the hive as male was actually used for centuries to justify patriarchal monarchy as being “by God’s design” because after all, look at the bee hive (somehow when we realized it was actually a female that logic went up in smoke).
So there were other people that did know what was correct, but Aristotle screwed up the development of thinking around it by rationalizing an opposite answer with an appeal to misogyny.
Wild that he was only two degrees of separation from a teacher famed for praising the knowledge of self-ignorance and not falling into false positives and negatives.
What I’m getting from this is that people were the same back then as they are now. Aristotle was basically a hack who said just the right bigoted things for the ruling class to latch onto to justify the status quo. Like an ancient political commentator, or popular “scientist” who says anything for attention.
But the Epicureans also denied that virtue is primary in achieving eudaimonia and from a Stoic POV, that’s just a cardinal sin. Due to the Stoics is also the idea of animals being self-aware as well as cosmopolitanism and the absolutely unheard of notion that women have the same mental faculties as men and thus should also enjoy education.
But really, all the “Figuring out how to be like Sokrates” schools of philosophy were highly productive.
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