A Comm for Historymemes

You don't need to be a doctor today to that ... just call yourself a 'Faith Healer', 'Shaman' or 'Medicine Person' ... don't need no fancy institution or organization to get those credentials.

I'm Indigenous in Canada and human gullibility, taking advantage of people and charlatanism is not something that Indigenous people are immune to .... we have our problems with nutjobs who pretend they are more powerful than anyone else for one reason or another. We have our religious leaders who think they have more power than anyone else just because they want to.

I once met a traditional 'Shaman' at a Pow Wow who did a whole ceremony in front of people telling them how great he was and how his brews, herbs and remedies and chants and singing could cure anything .... he even claimed he could cure cancer. I talked to him for a while and you'd think he was genuine but when it came to receiving his medicine bundle I asked him how much and he said 'how much is your health worth to you?' .... I immediately thought that was a fantastic sales pitch, gave him $20 and told everyone I met that he was just another fraud. A day later he appeared in the local paper saying he had healed a woman with cancer .... the woman died a few months later and we never heard from this faith healer again.

Explanation: Medieval Western European ("Frankish") medicine was somewhat... lacking. Please enjoy this anecdote from an Arab noble during the Crusades as way of example:

The lord of al-Munaytirah wrote to my uncle asking him to dispatch a physician to treat certain sick persons among his people. My uncle sent him a Christian physician named Thabit. Thabit was absent but ten days when be returned. So we said to him, "How quickly has thou healed thy patients!" He said:

They brought before me a knight in whose leg an abscess had grown; and a woman afflicted with imbecility. To the knight I applied a small poultice until the abscess opened and became well; and the woman I put on diet and made her humor wet. Then a Frankish physician came to them and said, "This man knows nothing about treating them." He then said to the knight, "Which wouldst thou prefer, living with one leg or dying with two?" The latter replied, "Living with one leg." The physician said, "Bring me a strong knight and a sharp ax." A knight came with the ax. And I was standing by. Then the physician laid the leg of the patient on a block of wood and bade the knight strike his leg with the ax and chop it off at one blow. Accordingly he struck it-while I was looking on-one blow, but the leg was not severed. He dealt another blow, upon which the marrow of the leg flowed out and the patient died on the spot. He then examined the woman and said, "This is a woman in whose head there is a devil which has possessed her. Shave off her hair." Accordingly they shaved it off and the woman began once more to cat their ordinary diet-garlic and mustard. Her imbecility took a turn for the worse. The physician then said, "The devil has penetrated through her head." He therefore took a razor, made a deep cruciform incision on it, peeled off the skin at the middle of the incision until the bone of the skull was exposed and rubbed it with salt. The woman also expired instantly. Thereupon I asked them whether my services were needed any longer, and when they replied in the negative I returned home, having learned of their medicine what I knew not before.

For fairness's sake, the same author relates another story of Frankish medicine of the period, much more positive (though less relevant to the meme)

I do fr think about this though, I know how to wash my hands, so if I get magically transported back in time, I could probably be a doctor and do ok.

Pfft, one at a time? Amatuer.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-health-communications-cdc-hhs-fda-1eeca64c1ccc324b31b779a86d3999a4

Sure a lot of practical steps to keep people healthy or prevent simple deaths can be taken that most people will know but the difference between doctors back then and now is that in the past they were more akin to faith healers than our current definition of a doctor.

I doubt that. Dying patients were not recieved well. See: https://youtu.be/w2f_jajCAsU

I can't find the actual comic to link to, but the artist is here: https://jakelikesonions.com