The mind that skips the middle third belongs in the nineteenth century. The real trigger for the prescription is the cough, a symptom. It's the same with kids and fevers. Half the antibiotics we modern docs prescribe are as laughably worthless as the nux vomica used 100 years ago. Then Prozac's for you.
Accurate diagnosis is tough, often unpopular, and unachievable without excellent training.
The 1899 Merck Manual offers a wonderful glimpse of where we've been. A single tear, trickling down his face, burned like acid into the consciences of Americans who imagine that pre-Columbian Americans always lived in harmony with the land, revered their prey, and husbanded their natural resources. In The Ecological Indian , Brown University anthropologist Shepard Krech III questions whether this stereotyped view is accurate. He paints a picture of Native Americans who coupled a shrewd understanding of some ecological conditions with downright ignorance of others. The Hohokam, who flourished in the arid Southwest 500 years ago, built the largest canal system in North America and irrigated an estimated 10,000 acres.