This article was published in 1925. I’m working on another, longer post on the subject of medical fads, but for now:
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Fashions in medicine we have, and shall continue to have. But it requires a lens tinted with humour to recognize them and examine them with the proper degree of detachment…
…Once they get started, however, one can see
how they keep going. The chief factor is the herd
instinct, the desire to be in the swim, to be “up to
date. ” Further, the public demand for a treatment
that has become fashionable, helps to keep it
alive.
Fashions are also maintained by the cures which they effect at the outset of their career, for there can be no doubt that every fashion does effect some cures. It does so, we know, through the power of faith and suggestion, which is the meaning of Trousseau’s well known advice to a patient, ‘Take this while it is still curing.’ But by and by when the novelty has worn off, the cures cease. “ …The history of medicine is full of the growth and decline of fashions,…
One should not envy the fashionable
doctor, rather should one wonder at him. He
leads a life of slavery … His position, too, on a pinnacle is
always precarious. He has, it is true, his little
day, but he is apt to wake up one morning to find
that his worshippers have stampeded en masse
overnight to some newer shrine of the fickle
goddess Fashion.
