[Kain]

#3.The Best Way to Stop Deadly Bleeding

Claudius Galenus (called "Galen" by his peers) was the greatest surgeon in the world back in the second century AD, which is a little like saying he was the "classiest stripper in Atlantic City." Galen's contemporaries, after all, were convinced that arteries were filled with air, which gives you some idea of how useful they were when you were bleeding to death. And Galen himself was a huge advocate of bloodletting, and was the first doctor to prescribe "bleeding it out" as a perfectly reasonable way to cure headaches.

Yet Dr. G was also the first guy who popularized ligature as a method of stopping uncontrollable bleeding. Ligature, for those of you who aren't in the medical know, is tying up a bleeding artery, vein or pee valve. Before Galen there was only one treatment for deadly bleeding: Cauterizing. Sounds all right, unless you know that "cauterize" is Latin for "burn it shut."

Also known as arson on your arteries

As the chief surgeon for wounded gladiators in Pergamus, Turkey, Galen was the first to stop a hemorrhage by tying the injured vessel closed. And he got so good at zipping fools up that the mortality rate of his charges was next to nothing, which rightfully made him famous. His technique revolutionized medicine...

Or it would have, if the world hadn't completely forgotten about it for the next 1500 years.

How Could We Have Forgotten It?

By the Middle Ages, no one was doing the ligature thing. Not only was cauterizing the only way to deal with bleeding valves, Europeans decided to one-up the barbarism by full-on pouring boiling tar on the injury rather than using a hot iron. BOILING TAR.
Why?


Well, lots of brilliant stuff was forgotten during the Dark Ages, like the shape of the Earth and how to bathe. In Medieval Europe, touching a sick person was a no-no--you'd probably feel the same way if 60 percent of the people in your universe died of the plague. So instead of tying an injured artery closed, the surgeon just burned it shut with a long metal rod. Or poured BOILING TAR on it.


Meanwhile, the Islamic world actually embraced Galen's teachings, and kept his immense legacy alive while the Western world got progressively stupider. But they had their own problem: Getting all up inside a sickie's veins wasn't kosher, or whatever the Islamic word for kosher is, and the Muslim world that loved so much of Galen's other teachings let this one little remedy go the way of the pulled pork sandwich.

It wasn't until 1575 that a French surgeon re-popularized Galen's idea about ligature and people started getting their tie on again--a whole lot of dead patients and an ocean of spilled blood later.


p.s: i couldn't help but comment on the Islam doesn't think it's Halal part Now i don't know the exact reasons but i HAVE taken a course on Islamic history in uni where Islamic medicine was discussed in one of the chapters. And this completely contradicts the practice of medicine in those times. But hey i might also be wrong so if any of you would like to double-check then google it.