... a lesson from history provides a new perspective on them.
François Bonivard was a nobleman, churchman and historian in the 16th century. He wrote his Chronicles of Geneva, a history of the city-state, towards the end of his life. In it, he described the impact of the Black Death (bubonic plague) on the city in 1530.
When the bubonic plague struck Geneva in 1530, everything was ready. They even opened a whole hospital for the plague victims. With doctors, paramedics and nurses. The traders contributed, the magistrate gave grants every month. The patients always gave money, and if one of them died alone, all the goods went to the hospital.
But then a disaster happened: the plague was dying out, while the subsidies depended on the number of patients. There was no question of right and wrong for the Geneva hospital staff in 1530. If the plague produces money, then the plague is good. And then the doctors got organized.
At first, they just poisoned patients to raise the mortality statistics, but they quickly realized that the statistics didn't have to be just about mortality, but about mortality from plague. So they began to cut the boils from the bodies of the dead, dry them, grind them in a mortar and give them to other patients as medicine. Then they started dusting clothes, handkerchiefs and garters. But somehow the plague continued to abate. Apparently, the dried buboes didn't work well. Doctors went into town and spread bubonic powder on door handles at night, selecting those homes where they could then profit. As an eyewitness wrote of these events, "this remained hidden for some time, but the devil is more concerned with increasing the number of sins than with hiding them."
In short, one of the doctors became so impudent and lazy that he decided not to wander the city at night, but simply threw a bundle of dust into the crowd during the day. The stench rose to the sky and one of the girls, who by a lucky chance had recently come out of that hospital, discovered what that smell was.
The doctor was tied up and placed in the good hands of competent “craftsmen.” They tried to get as much information from him as possible. However, the execution lasted several days. The ingenious hippocrats were tied to poles on wagons and carried around the city. At each intersection the executioners used red-hot tongs to tear off pieces of meat. They were then taken to the public square, beheaded and quartered, and the pieces were taken to all the districts of Geneva.
The only exception was the hospital director's son, who did not take part in the trial but blurted out that he knew how to make potions and how to prepare the powder without fear of contamination. He was simply beheaded "to prevent the spread of evil".
I can think of agencies and institutions staffed by hundreds, if not thousands, of medical personnel who might benefit from the same treatment over their (mis)handling of the public health crisis caused by COVID-19. As for treatments like ventilators, Remdesivir and others, which seem to have caused a lot more harm than they alleviated...
Now we hear rumors that COVID-19 protocols such as masking, vaccination, etc. may be brought back again. If they are, perhaps we should take a lesson from the way the good citizens of Geneva handled their medical problem half a millennium ago.
Peter
16 comments:
All cause mortality is still up over baseline. It is my fervent hope that people will not comply with the new vax mandate on its way and further refuse to mask, which has also shown to be ineffective.
This would of course be a good time to release whatever was being worked on in the Ukraine.
Get some sun, lay in a stock of Vitamin D and K2 and some zinc as well.
Friends, please remember that this is a family-friendly blog. If you use profanity in your comments, they're not going to be published. Occasional swearing in minor key is acceptable, but F-bombs and the like are not.
As people are talking about this "Eris" variant something that seems important to me is not being mentioned at all.
We've seen data now from several honest countries showing that chance of dying of Covid is highest for those who have had the most boosters. Instead of a pandemic of the unvaccinated, as was sold to us, it's a pandemic of the vaccinated.
If you haven't been vaccinated, I don't think I need to tell you not to start down that road now. The tricky part is if you have been vaccinated, you should avoid a booster. The more boosters you've had the stronger that warning needs to be. If you've had the vax and the boosters, this is going to run very hard against the grain. The foreign data implies your risk of dying is higher than it should be. If you had Covid and recovered, your immunity is as good as it is going to be.
As approach respiratory virus season in the northern hemisphere, pressure is going to be brought. We already see colleges kicking out students who won't take the vax. It's going to get rocky from here on.
I hold out little hope that the majority of Americans will do anything diffrently this time - I still see these folks driving alone with a mask on.
I refused to wear a mask, but was forced to for doctors' appointments- despite the fact I had /have a medical reason which would exempt me (asthma) as well as a CDC exemption from the clot shots themselves- I have a neurological disease. It became obvious to me that this whole Covid thing has nothing to do with health. Their solution- 'see' a PA/NP via Zoom.
I also have been hearing rumors that TPTB will "get serious" about forcing compliance this time - I guess the population is not dying fast enough- and some of what I hear suggests that compliance will be enforced using CBDC measures, to restrict or freeze access to bank accounts. No question this is coming, but I am not sure if they are ready to pull that trigger just yet. Such a step would have the seme effect as Revelation 13:17...and this would mean that all believers will have be taken home before this. So there is a big upside to it!
One thing I think is clear- the next 4 months are going to be .. interesting.
Bonivard must have been Nostradamus' little brother, since there were no paramedics until four hundred years later, nursing as a profession was largely unheard of before the 1800s, and physicians any time before 1800 were a complete and total joke, at which time they were successfully supplanted by trained and empirical barber-surgeons, a habit which continues to this day.
So you can guess from which end of the bull that whole blog excerpt issued, and the blogger that wrote it clearly speaks it fluently.
Case #3,473,869 of "It must be true: I read it on the internet!"
Caveat lector.
@Aesop: I think we have to make allowances for the translator, who was probably trying to find modern terms to describe medieval "practitioners".
While I too question the story, there are any number of times something similar has happened in history.
A great recent example is MADD and SADD. Their reason for being (drunk driving) is a fraction of what it used to be, so they have expanded their sphere and changed their criteria to justify their continued existence.
JH
Regards the tale told and various responses, the grinding of scabs and dried sore s or pustules was indeed the way the early attempts at controlling or passing a variety of illness' was noted historically. So there is that.
If Bob in NC is correct, we will need to support and encourage those around us not to take the clot shot. If enough people say no the economy comes crashing to a halt. This may mean feeding people. If TPTB try the CBDC route, barter or use gold/silver/whatever item works. It will be a giant game of chicken.
Easy to say, less than 50% of people have a first aid kit in the house. Now greater than 50% of the population receives some government benefits. Will any Governor or Joint Chief say no? What happens when you can't pay your electric bill in CBDC or your water? Pension and social security frozen until you comply. How ugly will this go?
Karl Denniger is great about citing sources as are Chris Martenson (Peak Prosperity) and Dr. John Campbell on YouTube. Share to those to whom it may benefit. I'm the family kook and at this point no one has given me any indication they believe me over the media but at least I introduced an acquaintance to the realities of Vitamin D this weekend (He was afraid to take Vit D due to possibility of overdose)
Anon @ 8:42... I'll see your MADD/SADD and raise you the "March of Dimes".
I'ts a good thing that Aesop is also part of the internet so his writings can be just as easily disregarded.
"nursing as a profession was largely unheard of before the 1800s"
- that's why we have literal knightly orders that still exist today which started out in the early/high middle ages (depending on your definition) as... nurses.
"and physicians any time before 1800 were a complete and total joke, at which time they were successfully supplanted by trained and empirical barber-surgeons,"
- Oh god, where to begin... Barber-Surgeons and physicians coexisted for centuries before 1800 - and it was the PHYSICIANS that were institutional trained. Both possessed empirical knowledge (in limitations) but what we consider "scientific" did only start in the 18th century and it still took a long, very long time to take effect.
The medical practitioners of old lacked the knowledge we have today but many
practices still had the desired effect even if for another reason than was thought.
Xoph-
I hear you on being dismissed as a nut case.
My wife wanted to take the shot early on (when they were talking about viral shedding) and I had to tell her that she would be putting me at risk before she changed her mind. Two of our 3 adult kids were forced to take it to keep their jobs, but thanks be to God, they have suffered no ill effects. And I sent info on the dangers of the shot to everyone I knew including my extended family and friends, and I believe they all ignored the warnings. Only my wife has ever admitted she is glad she changed her mind – saving me the “I told you so.”
As was mentioned, the chances of serious /fatal consequences increase with each booster, and our kids were not required to get boosters as their employers considered the first shot to be fully vaccinated. But I suspect this will change with the upcoming episode.
I put nothing past whoever is currently running the government- which has proven it is more than willing to kill its own citizens with impunity.
Peter,
I'll believe that when I see the source word(s) that were so ham-fistedly fornicated.
German from 1530 was some seventy-five years after Gutenberg's printing press went into operation, so all forms of German from that era is tremendously well-preserved.
I'll wager it also hasn't changed linguistically so very much from that time, because once language was printed, it became far more standardized.
When someone inserts wildly anachronistic words into a tale, it generally becomes one of the fairy variety, rather than a historical documentary.
B.S. flag throw, penalty sustained IMHO. It fails the smell test.
@tiredWeasel,
1) Go back and do the history of "paramedics" for the class. You seem to have glossed over it completely.
2) Yes, nursing existed, but it wasn't professional until centuries later, and it was largely men in knightly and monastic orders, which took a YUUUUUUGE hit in rapidly Protestant Germany thirteen years after Martin Luther kicked off the Reformation with his 95 Theses.
3) Yes, barber surgeons and physicians co-existed, but their sheepskins had university-trained physicians (who thought themselves better and smarter - anyone, stop me if you've heard this one about college graduates in general - than the jumped up commoner non-collegiate pretenders who were all former head-lopping executioners), practicing bleeding and using Galen's Four Humors Theory, whereas barber-surgeons only got paid (mainly by the lower classes) if they got results, and had actually seen people cut open, thus possessing a much better understanding of basic anatomy than any school-trained physician for literally hundreds of years to come.
University-trained physicians were still killing people with superstition and bloodletting as late as the cusp of the 1800s.
https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/the-death-of-george-washington/
Padua, the premier medical college of the age, didn't even build a dissection theater for students until 1595, 60 years after the events in the excerpted blog post.
Barber-surgeons had been practicing their craft for hundreds of years before that time, with the benefit of practical experience with both living and dead.
You ought to do better homework before you presume to lecture others on medical history.
Or at least sit through Captain Blood a couple of times.
Aesop, it's always fun when you get called out on your bullsh*t because instead of shutting up you double down.
I didn't even touch the paramedics and yet this is literally your first response. Yes yes, we all see your biiiig brain.
But it is full of hot air because even paramedics, in a military frame of reference, existed even before the middle ages and in the middle ages... well, knightly orders. But for some reason people who devoted their life to the role of giving care to wounded soldiers or nursing sick people are in your eyes "not professional" because... so sayeth the allknowing Aesop.
Its pathetic really, how you twist and turn and try to circle back on your words. We were not talking about dissecting bodies yet somehow this is your argument - which is not what you said in your first post and it is not connected to what I said.
All bark and no bite. Smoke and mirrors. Like a White House press secretary.
Ever heard the story of the Emperors new clothes? Yeah, it's like that with your "knowledge".
"Padua, the premier medical college of the age, didn't even build a dissection theater for students until 1595, 60 years after the events in the excerpted blog post." By the way: This is only the dissection theater that is still standing today.
Dissections were practiced in the Padua University since the 13th century. But we don't want pesky little facts get into the way of Aesops Lala-Land, no would we?
Tell us you didn't do basic research (by following the links and, you know, reading them without actually saying you didn't bother doing that. First off, Geneva is in one of the majority French-speaking cantons. Second, Francois Bonivard is so obviously a French name that it should be no surprise iwhen you follow the link to the Chronicles of Geneva that it is in 16th Century French, not German. Jean Calvin actually corrected the manuscript, which wasn't actually published until 1831. It's a bit of a pain to find the original text in the digitized book, but presumably it's there. The translation obviously took liberties in translating some words to modern English, but without examining the original 16th Century French, you can't simply dismiss it entirely due to disagreeing with how a couple of terms are translated. Maybe it is bollocks, and the warning is appropriate , but without doing the work, you don't know . I'm searching for the passage now and will post it when I find it, which is what the translator should've done.
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