Ancient Egyptians used leeches to treat a wide range of physical ailments, from headaches to liver and kidney disease to infections to hemorrhoids. They believed that “evil spirits” had infected the person’s body and the removal of the blood was removing the “evil spirits”. Hippocrates, the Greek physician who is considered the “father of Western medicine”, believed that a sick patient’s four internal “humors” had become misaligned, so he used leeches to remove blood from a patient to “balance the humors”. In the Middle Ages, leeches were used to draw out the “bad blood” that medieval physicians believed caused many of their patients’ ailments. In the 19th century, “leech mania” swept through Europe and America, as the practice of bloodletting emerged as a widely accepted “modern” medical treatment. Every year during that time, 5 to 6 million leeches were used to draw more than 300,000 liters of blood in Parisian hospitals alone. Barbers were considered medical practitioners and bloodletting was one of their most common treatments. That is why the barber pole is red and white striped.
Thousands of years ago, it was common practice to drill a hole into a person’s skull who was suffering from convulsions, seizures, or forms of psychosis. They believed that “evil spirits” had infected the patient’s brain, and drilling the hole allowed the “evil spirit” to be released and the brain could realign. 70 years ago, the smartest minds believed that the best way to treat mental illness was to shoot 110 volts of electricity into the brain of the patient to shock the brain back into alignment. And many times, if that didn’t work, then the doctors resorted a lobotomy, removing most of the frontal lobe of the patient which had been deemed the bad part of the brain. In the 18th and 19th century, hemi-glossectomy, the removal of part of a patient’s tongue was used to help cure a stutter.
Having parasites suck blood out of the patient, shooting volts of electricity through the brain, removing most of the patient’s frontal lobe, and cutting out half their tongue were all common procedures at one time in human history, and if anyone questioned the use of these procedures, they would have been dismissed and silenced for being anti-science or whatever the equivalent was at the time. As we look back at those procedures from the perspective of 50 to 3,000 years, we judge the practitioners of those types of “medical procedures” as quacks or even monsters. Everyone acknowledges how barbaric those practices were. When I think about what these “doctors” were doing, I say to myself, “I can’t believe they actually drilled a hole into a person’s head or cut out half his brain, thinking that would solve the problem.”
How will the eyes of history view some of the “medical” practices of our time. Abortion is often called “women’s healthcare”. 100 to 200 years from now, how will those people view the practice of sucking an unborn baby out of the mother’s womb, where the baby’s arms and legs are ripped off of his tiny body as he fights against the procedure until it’s little heart stops beating? How will the eyes of history judge the practice of providing no medical attention to the babies who happen to survive an abortion. Trained doctors and nurses standing there idle as a little baby, fights for life, offering no help to the baby as she gasps her final breath? Will history be kind to those people? Will history be kind to all of us who have allowed it to happen? How will history treat the advocates for partial birth abortion, where a full-term baby is born just enough so the doctor can insert a scalpel into his skull and suck his brains out?
There are countries in Africa and the Middle East where female genital mutilation of girls is a commonly accepted practice in their culture. It is considered a way to promote virginity and marital fidelity because it usually makes sexual intercourse extremely painful. We, in the West, rightfully view that practice as barbaric. But how will history view the practice of transgenderism that is sweeping the Western World, especially through the indoctrination of our youth? How will history judge treating people who have a mental disorder by surgically removing the person’s healthy reproductive organs. Leeches may seem minor compared to removing a penis, or a total mastectomy, or a hysterectomy. How doctors are slicing up the human body is barbaric, regardless of how skillfully they do it.
The ancient doctors were not performing these procedures because they enjoyed doing them, or because they were evil. In these cases, the doctors believed they had “discovered” the cause of the affliction. In medicine, if you can identify and name a condition, then you believe you can treat it. Terms, like “gender identity disorder” or “gender dysphoria” were just made up. The human species has been around for tens of thousands of years, and they just came up with these terms yesterday, and we’re supposed to accept them as grounds to slice up people’s reproductive organs. “Gender identity disorder” or “gender dysphoria” are concepts that claim there is a misalignment of the spirit and the body in the transgender patient which echoes the ancient's justification of their barbaric procedures. The ancients believed that they were releasing the “evil spirits” or balancing the internal “humors” of the patient, and transgender surgeons believe they are using a surgical procedure to get the spirit realigned with the body.
How will the eyes of history judge this generation? As brilliant or barbaric? Or will they say, “I can’t believe they actually cut off men’s penises or women’s breasts, thinking it will solve their mental problems.” Maybe, those living 200 years from now will think all of this as sane and normal, but that would merely be evidence that they are living in an even more dystopian society than we are today. As we have recently discovered through Vanderbilt Medical school, transgender surgery is an extremely lucrative business; it is a multi-billion-dollar industry, charging some patients up to $100,000 for “gender affirming care”, and that is why it is so widely promoted, and our kids are targeted for indoctrination. It appears that many modern transgender surgeons have reverted back to ancient Egyptian times, and they have become the leeches sucking the lifeblood out of their mentally confused patients.
Judd Garrett is a graduate from Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.