Before the revolution

We conclude that it can be useful to teach something that is actually wrong.

Our tutor has a student who has recently been trying to sort out the Scientific Revolution.  We are well-prepared to back him up in this area if he needs it; for instance, a main theme of that Revolution was played out in astronomy, and we have an astronomer on staff.  So far our tutor has done an apparently successful job of placing Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo and Newton all in their proper places and summarizing the contribution of each one.  That is what the history teachers and AP exams will ask for.

Of course, the word “revolution” indicates a massive change from what came before, so to justify the term we need to understand Ancient and Medieval science.  The class our student is taking does not place much emphasis on this.  There is a reference to the geocentric universe that Copernicus replaced and possibly some instances where Galileo’s experiments contradicted Aristotelian physics, but on the whole students learn almost nothing about the old theories.

Should the students learn more?  After all, these are not just simplifications of what we now accept, done to make learning easier at the outset; they have very basic flaws.  It might be confusing to students to learn something that really isn’t true; worse, they might retain the wrong story and forget the correct one.

But we think a better coverage of Aristotle and Ptolemy would indeed be worthwhile.  The students would learn just how much of a change the Scientific Revolution wrought, and thus how hard it must have been to come up with something so radically different.  Perhaps more important, they will learn how plausible explanations that were generally accepted for centuries turned out to be quite wrong.  We plan to produce a summary of Aristotelian physics and Ptolemaic astronomy for our tutor’s use.  (It may take us a bit of time, though; our Basic Works of Aristotle runs to 1500 pages; perhaps we’ll find an authoritative summary instead.)

After that, we intend to step outside our areas of expertise and summarize Ancient and Medieval medicine also.  In fact we think this would be more important.  While the old physics and astronomy more or less vanished by early in the eighteenth century, the old medicine lingered on, influencing doctors and surgeons well into the nineteenth.

Here is an example.  Ancient medicine identified four humors, four fluids contained in the body, and considered diseases to be caused by an imbalance among them.  They are blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm; not necessarily identical with how we now use the words, though blood comes close.  Many maladies were considered to be caused by too much blood, and the treatment prescribed was bleeding: either opening up a vein or applying leeches to the skin.  We have an account of a British officer wounded by a musket ball at Waterloo, in 1815.  He was repeatedly bled over several days, until he had his servant kill the leeches he was supposed to apply.  This is almost exactly the opposite of the treatment he would receive today, which would consist of transfusions (and antibiotics).  He recovered in spite of the doctors.

And the humors live on in our language.  People are described as melancholy, sanguine, bilious, choleric; these terms originally described people with too much of one of the humors.  And “humorous” itself, now meaning funny, originally described comic plays containing characters identifiable by these terms.

So we think there is some worth in learning something that isn’t true.