I was strolling through Caroline Furlong’s blog archives (https://carolinefurlong.wordpress.com/) and came across a review she had written in May of 2023. It’s about a book written in 2018 by Dawn Raffel, an author I had never heard of (I haven’t heard of lots of people …) titled

The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies. by Dawn Raffel

https://carolinefurlong.wordpress.com/2023/05/19/review-the-strange-case-of-dr-couney-by-dawn-raffel/comment-page-1/

The book is about the invention, or at least use of, incubators to save fragile or premature babies, by a man who called himself Dr. Couney. He showed the babies at fairs and amusement parks as one of the gawker attractions in the early 1900’s. In this way he was able to finance excellent care and nurses for the babies. I want to read this book, but I haven’t gotten my hands on a copy, yet.

The review suggested that not everyone was on board with Dr. Couney. That made me think about other doctors and their innovations. Three in particular come to mind.

Dominique-Jean Larrey (1766-1842) was a military surgeon. According to the Catholic encyclopedia he sent doctors and nurses onto the battlefield (of Napoleon I presume) and also discussed the general health of soldiers. This URL goes a little further.
https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/dominique-jean-baron-larrey/ Larrey’s father was also a doctor and it seemed to be a family trait to be excellent in surgery. Larrey himself was wholly entranced by Napoleon Bonaparte, and went with him into many battles. He saw how soldiers were left on the field for hours during and after a battle, and established the “flying ambulance”, not an actual object in the sky in the early 1800s, but a light wagon drawn by swift horses, that went into battle and picked up wounded soldiers as quickly as possible. Larrey trained men to go with the ambulances, and sometimes did surgery right on the field with bullets whistling over head. He was noted for saving friend and enemy alike.

After the French failed to invade Russia and were retreating in great disorder there was a moment when the French were desperately trying to cross a river. There was a huge crush of men pushing and shoving to get across. When the soldiers realized that Larrey was at the back of this crush, they yelled his name to each other. Then they picked him up and passed him overhead to the bridge, kind of like a mosh pit. It’s a great story.

New Advent also mentions that he was a baron, but his family was so poor that his early education was due to the village priest. It says that near the end of his life he met the Abbe again, and was very happy about it. https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09007a.htm

Next up is Rene Theophile Hyacinth Laennec (1781-1826), the inventor of the stethoscope. His stethoscope was a rigid wooden tube, which makes sense because rubber in quantity was still in the future. He owed some of his ideas to Auenbruegger who practiced thumping on chests to discover what was wrong. (It’s a very forgotten art these days, but I remember the doctor thumping my back when I was small.) Some physicians tapped on the chest and some got closer. Laennec didn’t really want to get to close to chests. Here’s a helpful comment on that practice.

… the other option available to the early 19th century physician was the ancient practice of direct or immediate auscultation, listening to the chest sounds and heartbeat by pressing the ear to the chest wall. … auscultation was … practiced in ancient Greece, but … some patients were too obese for sounds to be heard … also some patients did not bath[e], others were infested with vermin and modesty was an issue, especially with female patients.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1570491/

The stethoscope took the place of this direct ear to chest, and provided better information. Laennec wrote quite a bit about diseases in the chest, having confirmed his findings by post-mortem on patients who didn’t make it.

The last doctor is Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865), who discovered the connection between handwashing (or not) and dying in childbed.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3881728/ This article, illustrated with postage stamps that honored Semmelweis over the years, also contains clear statistics developed by Semmelweis, on the elimination of childbed fever. He compared the results when the attendants, who were usually medical students who came straight from doing autopsies, washed their hands and their equipment, vs when they didn’t. His ideas were not accepted, although the results were quite clear. Semmelweis died of blood-poisoning after he had been locked up in an insane asylum. (Complex story.) He had a fight with the guards when he realized that he was being secretly committed, and a wound he suffered (probably) at the time, was not treated. It went septic, and he died of the disease he spent his life trying to treat.

According to the article, one reason his ideas weren’t accepted was that he couldn’t explain the reason for them. Prior to the discovery of germs by Pasteur, no-one could explain what was traveling on the equipment of the students who went straight from autopsies to examine pregnant women. I find this fascinating.

It is the same problem that plagued Galileo when he refused to believe that the moon caused the tides. Since the concept of gravity hadn’t been clarified, no-one could explain how the moon was affecting the tides, so he refused to accept the idea. Again, when people argued about continental drift, they couldn’t explain how the continents moved. So there was an insistence that, therefore, they couldn’t move. Brother Guy Consolmagno discussed this scientific problem in a book about being the Vatican astronomer, (Brother Astronomer: Adventures of a Vatican Scientist by Guy Consolmagno). In his case, a study of some meteorites had suggested that certain ones came from an asteroid. Everyone pooh-poohed the idea because, how could it happen? Then someone (and the details have totally escaped me) figured out how it could happen so everyone suddenly was on board. Oh, yes, some meteorites come from an asteroid. But the point Consolmagno made was that one principle scientists should accept is this: If it (an event) did happen, then it can! Or put another longer, more clunky, way — just because you can’t explain how it happened, that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.