Dr. Lister's Disruptive Analysis of a Financial Crisis: How a dying President with a bullet hole in his back was fatally infected and bled to death by the medical establishment; outrage paved the way for a quantum leap in antiseptic surgery.
Meet the "Garfield Metaphor": The Law of Unintended Consequences Never Fails... All We Need Is a Few Good Mid-wives
"Nobody but radicals have ever accomplished anything in a great crisis."
-President James Garfield
What Shakespeare really said was "kill all the doctors!"
Ok. No one ever said that the truly bizarre is off limits when it comes to finding new solutions to ever-recurring, civilization-threatening financial crises. So I was intrigued while I was reading a rather amazing story about the Garfield assassination and it is one fascinating tale. How on earth could a national trauma of slowly dying U. S. president lead to a medical breakthrough? Any lessons to be learned here?
Bare with me since this is a rather graphic re-telling but better than the intellectual pornography we must endure to fix the sharks in the goldfishman tank. It goes something like this: When Garfield was shot in the back he ended up with a lead ball lodge near his vertebrae; goodole Garfy lingered on for an agonizing 80 days.
The prevailing medical wisdom at the time was good-old fashion centuries-old bleeding (remember the god-awful cutting and leeches and releasing the humours?) No one was ever cured other than occassionally by sheer statistical luck and most patient/victims eventually either died from loss of blood or uber-nasty infections.
But a rather disruptive Scottish fellow from the University of Glascow, Dr. Joseph Lister (as in Listerine), had closely studied Louis Pasteur and devised a method of ultra-cleanliness to prevent dreadful infection from surgery. Lister's technique was summarily dismissed by the American Medical establishment as utter rubbish (what we call Threshold Resistance). So things like washing your hands, cleaning/sterilizing medical instruments, using clean bandages and the sort was considered laughable by the know-it-alls. So 60 or so doctors who over time would on a daily basis digitally probe Garfield's hole in his back looking for the bullet or sticking an unsanitized barberous piece of surgical equipment or other instrument borrowed from the blacksmith used to make horseshoes.
So the best brains of the medical profession just kept sticking their dirty little fingers in the poor guy's wound 10-20 times a day (makes going to the proctologist sound like a cakewalk) and bled him(the state of the art medical therapy for everything) several times a day, also lancing with filthy surgical instruments those super gross, really nasty infections to let the massive amounts of pus oozing out.
Most doctor's who came to try to help save their president rode into Washington on horseback and had traces of horse manure on their hands. The thought of washing their hands? Unthinkable!!!! Poor Garfield was like a human pin cushion. Finally after 80 days the infection overwhelmed poor Garfield and he was probably rather relieved to move on to greener pastures (due to lack of Pasteur).
Had Garfield survived, bleeding might still be all the medical rage, but the profile of this national event was visible enough to create a tipping point for sanitary surgery using Lister's technique. A few years later, awaiting coronation, Prince Edward had an emergency appendectomy under the aegis of Lister and was convinced Lister saved his life.
OK-- so what's the point? Seems to me Washington and the stimulus gurus are stuck in an antiquated universe -- a monetary policy paradigm making monetary policy akin to the the barbaric practice of "bleeding". Ironically during the late 1800's a study concluded showed midwives had a much higher success rate than surgeons who seem to have a thing about washing their hands (Lady Macbeth had probably gotten to them) and would move from one grotesque and bloody procedure to another without washing their hands and the resulting needless infections created a dramatically higher mortality rate than the good old fashion midwife's more painful but less unsanitary passing a basketball-through-your-penis approach.
So perhaps we should stop the barbaric technique of bleeding by the flamed-out monetary tools, fire all the financial surgeons who would like to wash their hands of the whole mess but can't find the soap-- let alone the faucet. Let's just hire a bunch of midwives, buy a few bottles of Listerine and let them run the Treasury.
Can't do any worse could they? Thanks President Garfield for serving your country.
Beware of men with rubber gloves.
p.s. Here is Garfield's vertebrae that was passed around at his assassin's trial. Most medical folks think if he were treated properly he would have been home and back on the job in a couple of days
