Why Did We Give These People Such Power Over Our Life?

 And under "these people" I mean doctors:

A Florida family fighting to give their loved one on a ventilator alternative treatments for COVID-19 have lost another battle—this time in Florida’s First District Court of Appeal.

 The wife and son of Daniel Pisano first squared off against Mayo Clinic Florida at an emergency hearing on Dec. 30 in Florida’s Fourth Judicial Circuit. Before that, they’d been begging the hospital to allow them to try treating Pisano—who’s been on a ventilator now for 28 days—with the controversial drug ivermectin, along with a mix of other drugs and supplements, part of a protocol recommended by the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC).

The family’s request for an emergency injunction to force the Mayo Clinic to allow treatments recommended by an outside doctor was denied by Judge Marianne Aho. They appealed the decision.

On Jan. 14, Aho’s decision was upheld by Florida’s First District Court of Appeal.

I mean WTF, the man is dying already, why can't the family try another treatment?

It all really began in Middle Ages when the governments decided that you needed a university diploma to be a doctor and started persecuting village healers as wizards and witches. Of course, only men could enter the university back then so that it effectively barred women from practicing medicine, and many a wise village Granny who knew a thing or two about herbs was executed for witchcraft.

A couple of centuries later male doctors started taking over midwifery. They told women to go to hospital to deliver their babies, where many of these women died from infection as the doctor would go from woman to woman without washing his hands, as they didn't know much about hygiene back then. A midwife, on the other hand, would take one patient at a time, so there was less possibility for infection.

Keep in mind that many doctors back then were not much better than quacks, despite their licenses. I read a story about some princess who when she became pregnant was told by doctors that bloodletting would make her labour easier. They bled her several times and as a result the poor thing became so anemic that she predictably died in childbirth.

The medical knowledge considerably improved through the 19th century and that's when they allowed women back into medicine but they had to become the part of the system and the system got even more connected to the state when the doctors and various government officials were given emergency powers to combat epidemics.

Think Typhoid Mary, who was accused of being an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever, the charge which was never 100% proved. Her story bears resemblance to those of witch hunt victims. A low class uneducated woman who worked as a cook in several families whose members succumbed to typhoid outbreaks yet Mary herself never became sick, the fact that made her very suspicious in the eyes of a (male) government official who was in charge of sewer system. He was sent to investigate these outbreaks and quickly decided that it was her fault.

Mary was involuntarily committed to a hospital where they kept collecting her stool samples and sending them to the lab, many returned as positive for typhoid while others didn't. And neither did those samples which she sent to a private lab. In the end they let her go but she had to promise never to work as a cook again. Yet cooks earned higher wages than maids so that Mary didn't keep her promise. The story goes that she caused another outbreak after which she had to spend the rest of her days on an island isolated from polite society.

In the light of modern paranoia about "asymptomatic covid spreaders" I started viewing her case in quite a different light. Whatever you think of the current situation, the roots of our modern problems go deep...