Enlightenment physicians accepted placebo power of quack rhetoric

Evidence

However, the claims of quacks (to whom shamans were often likened) were not always dismissed. Jerome Gaub, member of the Royal Society and professor of medicine, regarded their rhetoric and the credulity it addressed as valuable for healing: “It is this faith that physicians greatly wish for, since if they know how to procure it for themselves from the ill, they render them more obedient and are able to breathe new life into them with words alone, moreover they find the power of their remedies to be increased and the results made more certain.” The extravagant performances of mountebanks who promised cures aroused wonder, and wonder led to hope. “The arousal of the bodily organs is sometimes such that the vital principles cast off their torpidity, the tone of the nervous system is restored, the movements of the humors are accelerated, and nature then attacks and overcomes with her own powers a disease that prolonged treatment has opposed in vain. Let those fortunate enough to have more rapidly recovered by means of these empty arts than by means of approved systems of healing congratulate themselves, I say, on having regained their health, regardless of the reason!” For Gaub healing was a social process in which the inspiration of the healer was validated not by its occult source but by its salutary effect. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 239

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with the reader’s ADDENDUM on sacrifice — the validation of efficacy by salutary effect rather than by occult source parallels the pragmatic ritual logic in ‘On Sacrifice.’
• SHARE: A royal physician openly endorsing placebo mechanisms as legitimate healing a full two centuries before placebo-controlled trials is a great fact for a history-of-medicine friend.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: whether this Gaub passage contradicts the received story that Enlightenment medicine wholly rejected quackery, or whether Gaub was marginal.