"Doctors and their drugs are dangerous to your health, except in emergencies. Before seeing any doctor, listen to the doctor inside yourself who is telling you everyday what to eat and what not to eat. It is the best doctor you will ever find!"
OnidSum, School of Hard Nocks, 1940-
My Pneumonia and My First Doctor Encounter
Written on : December 2023
Edited last: January 2025
I was born in a small peasant community in southern Italy about nineteen months before the USA entered the second world war. My parents were on "cloud nine" at my arrival. I was their second boy and this was considered very important in those days because this assured that our family name would be carried on.
When I was growing up, my mother would recount from time to time that when I was one year old, in the spring of 1941, I contracted pneumonia. My parents were devastated as pneumonia was difficult to recover from, especially at my age, as these were the days before antibiotics. The fact that my mother's father had died of pneumonia in his fifties did not help. In those days, I was told, that if one contracted pneumonia, he just had to "weather it out" on his own. My father recounted that rarely anybody would die of pneumonia although they would spent several days in bed. Only the rich would seek doctor help because the only doctor in our area was too expensive to consult for most people. Now, knowing what happened to me, I cannot help thinking that my peasants were lucky that they could not afford the doctor.
Trying to do the best that they knew how, my parents reached out into their savings and had the doctor come to see me (Doctors made house calls in those days!). The doctor examined me, confirmed that I had pneumonia and, with a red pencil, he marked two spots under my left major pectoral muscle and, opposite to these, two spots on my back. Then he told my mother that he would have a lady come over the next day to apply leeches on the spots that he had marked to bleed the bad blood out of my body.
Yes, in those days blood letting was the doctors "gold standard" for treating pneumonia! An interesting note in passing, doctors in those days were often called "leeches" because of this practice of using leeches for blood letting.
The next day an older lady came over with leeches. It is as if I remember a clear glass pitcher full of water, with wiggly black things inside, sitting glittering in the sun on a window sill. Obviously I was too young to remember ... but this image is seared in my mind as if I actually saw it! The old lady placed one leech on each of the red marks made by the doctor and the leeches stuck on the spots until, gorged with blood, they fell off. The old lady dressed the wounds left by the leeches, and my mother and my grandmother rapped me back with "fasciaturi" and put me back in my cradle.
An interesting note in passing, in those days it was customary to wrap babies firmly with long strips of cotton cloth (fasciaturi) about six inches wide, just like a mummy, leaving only the head out. They believed that this wrapping was important for the baby to develop with straight legs, arms, and body. Another note of interest is that in those days and until later-on up to about the mid 1970s, babies in our area were born with their eyes closed, and it would take up to about two weeks before they would open their eyes. I will never forget my sister's surprise when she emigrated to Canada in the mid 1950s. "This is an amazing country" she wrote in one of her letters. "Here the babies are born with their eyeys open!"
After my mother had placed me back in my cradle, she resumed her house chores, but kept checking on me from time to time. A couple of hours later, she noticed blood dropping underneath my cradle. Alarmed, she screamed for help and my grandmother came over to help. They took the "fasciaturi" off and found blood bleeding out of the four holes that the leeches had left. The dressing placed by the old lady had not stopped the bleeding. And it was my grandmother that saved the day ... and my life! My mother would recount in amazement as my grandmother went into the stables where we kept our animals, and collected cobwebs from the corners of the stable. Then she split in half two dried cannellini beans, wrapped each half in cobwebs, and stuck them into the four holes left by the leeches. And that stopped the bleeding! They wrapped me back and put me back into the cradle... and the rest is history. I survived the ordeal!
Wasn't that an amazing procedure to stop the bleeding? My grandmother never went to school and she could neither read or write! They only way she could have learned the procedure was from the peasant experience accumulated over centuries. The moral? Book learning is important ... but never underestimate the value of experience! And was it not amazing that, in-spite of the heavy bleeding, I survived pneumonia without antibiotics?
Can you believe it? Doctors in those day submitted people, regardless of their age, to bloodletting to, supposedly, cure a number of different diseases. History recounts several cases where doctors killed their patients with this treatment. As the treatment was expensive, this fate befell mostly the rich. One of the famous cases, is the death of the French king Charles II. The treatment that he received is described in the article "The Death of King Charles II" by Jeffrey K Aronson, and Carl Heneghan, University of Oxford, Center of Evidence-Based Medicine. The treatment that he received seems to be out of an horror book, and included three bloodlettings for a total of 46 oz ( 1.4 liters) in the space of about four days, with the last 12 oz bled just before he died.
By the way, the scars left by the leeches are still visible on my body, and my left lung still shows up scarred in x-rays. The scars are fading with time, but they are still there.