🧪 The placebo-controlled trial wasn't invented by doctors. It was invented by medieval witch hunters.
In 1423, Jean Gerson proposed testing religious claims with consecrated vs unconsecrated objects that looked identical - the same logic behind modern placebo controls.
His method ended up in the Malleus Maleficarum (1486). In 1599, a French physician used it to prove a "possessed" girl wasn't really possessed - she reacted the same to real and fake holy water.
That trick-trial design reached Lavoisier and Franklin, who used it to debunk mesmerism in 1784 - the direct ancestor of every clinical trial.
Source: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/…
jcrabapple
Unknown parent • • •Bill Zaumen
in reply to jcrabapple • • •"Mesmerism" reminds me of an interesting factoid - Mesmer was a friend of Mozart, and references to Mesmer's use of magnets are in the opera Cosi fan Tutte, where two guys drink fake poison and are revived with magnets, which in this case work amazingly well in the hands of a "doctor" who is actually the maid in disguise.
academic.oup.com/ml/article-pd…
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Dieu
in reply to jcrabapple • • •"His method ended up in the Malleus Maleficarum (1486). In 1599, a French physician used it to prove a "possessed" girl wasn't really possessed - she reacted the same to real and fake holy water."
Cool to see the hierarchy of assumptions stick out here like an enormous wart.
🏳️⚧️ [screams in lowercase]
in reply to jcrabapple • • •