The grim circumstances behind the death of George Washington (1732-1799), America’s first president and popularly known as the Father of the Country, are not wholly unknown. The details have been reported by historians for more than two centuries.
What’s strange about this dry biographical knowledge is that it is not reported with shock and alarm and hence never conveyed to popular culture with lessons for our lives. This is because Washington’s physicians were following standard protocols when they bled him to death.
The facts: Washington came down with a throat infection. Three doctors, all convinced of the settled wisdom of the healing arts deployed since the Middle Ages, participated in draining blood from his body, to the point that they took 5 pints or fully half his blood, while giving him an enema on top of it all.
They literally drained the life out of him, not from malice but simply by following the established protocols as recommended by the best physicians at the time.
What’s happening in medicine right now is a massive rethinking of many conventional practices coming out of the allopathic monopoly that is a century old. In pursuit of keeping an orthodoxy in place, how many healthy practices have been left behind from other traditions such as Chinese medicine, homeopathy, chiropathy, or naturopathy, all of which are discouraged by conventional insurance and disparaged by pharma-funded media? How many practices today called the Standard of Care will in a generation or two be regarded as obviously horrible as the practice of bleeding?
George Washington’s terrible fate ought to have sounded a national alarm to ring through our long history. The lesson should be never to replace epistemic humility in medicine with institutionalized dogma. That lesson did not stick because, then and now, the prevailing medical wisdom gets a pass even when it kills people. Even the Father of the Country.
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