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Dear sir, if you genuinely believe women end up in lunatic asylums after getting pregnant because their over-developed brains have leeched the phosphates from their systems, I look forward to your opinions on reducing the superfluity of yellow bile in the choleric.
I don't genuinely believe that. Which is why I didn't make an argument in favor of it. I think you're missing the point here. The problem is not that we disagree with you on the object level about women's rights, the issue is that we disagree with your style of argument (or lack thereof).
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The literally biochemical explanation may not be technically true but the general idea seems accurate and is backed up by plenty of Science™️
Well science has adduced that women do experience basic emotions more strongly than men do. My own observation here is that some vocal individuals evidently have a lot of hangups with women even if I think they’re right on some things. But the most misogynistic people I’ve ever met in my entire life have been other women. Especially when you get them arguing on behalf of the men close to them; especially their sons. But women get shit on all the time for things they’re not allowed to say but men will happily say on their own behalf. Hypocritical if you ask me.
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Have you considered the health benefits of being leeched? I can assure you that Breaker’s House of Leeches sells only the finest leeches to temper your humours.
Buy one, get one, no returns.
My blood was tested recently and there was no problem, but I always keep the benefit of leeches in mind. Cutting for the stone may be the next port of call, can you recommend a good barber-surgeon?
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People always use this as a smackdown of antiquated and barbaric views on medicine but.....leeches did sometimes help. There are medical problems with some people having too high blood iron, which bloodletting does legitimately treat. Modern doctors will draw blood using needles and fancy modern equipment that didn't used to exist, and they actually know the underlying causes and how to properly diagnose these conditions rather than guessing. But ancient doctors had to guess and notice patterns to cure anything at all.
Some conditions get better if you lose blood -> put a leech on people whose symptoms seem similar to those ones and hope it works
is not the most profound logical chain, but it's not the kind of insane quackery that people treat it as whenever they talk about doctors and leeches.
No argument there, the ancients always impress me.
I don’t think I’ve ever really brought it up here, but one of the things about past humans up until maybe the 1930s or so, is that they had nothing but time with which to notice patterns.
Most entertainment activities and almost all of the work ones involved interacting with other humans on a constant basis. Most of them required you to go outside to do them, and mingle amongst other humans. Even if they don’t require it, like spinning, spinning by yourself is extremely boring and it’s more fun to go outside and talk to other people. They had a lot of time to notice patterns and behavioral trends in their fellow humans.
And once we got around to the Greeks, they started writing down their notes for us.
The fact that they had so much time just spent hanging around each other inclines me to trust their observations of human nature very highly.
I would caveat that by noting that people are prone to biases, and prior to the scientific method this was especially rampant. So a lot of this is overgeneralized. Going back to the leech example: while some cases of leech use were appropriate, a lot were just applied pointlessly to unrelated conditions. If you define man as a "featherless biped", logically a cripple who's lost a leg is no longer a man, while a plucked chicken is.
I would generally trust ancient wisdom that includes caveats like "most" or "usually", I would not trust them if they try to say "all" or "always".
Outside of places where they're controlled carefully, this is true of antibiotics today.
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