Best Practices are Dead. Long Live Best Practices.
Went down a rabbithole on the old web and I learned that "Bloodletting" was a common medical procedure for the better part of 3000 years. I'm kind of spellbound by the duration- it was one hell of a lindy effect. Our first evidence of its use appeared in Egypt, as indicated by the Ebers papyrus, an Egyptian medical papyrus dating to circa 1550 BC (link).
If you are hip in the academic world you might know that medical "doctors" are differentiated from PhDs in that they were practitioners and associated more closely with barbers during the middle ages (link). The red and white stripped pole of a barber shop was meant to represent blood and bandages... as the bloodletting procedure would often be recommended by doctors but carried out by barbers (link). In the 1830s, Bloodletting was so popular in Europe that more than 40 million (!) leeches were imported into France for the procedure (link).
By the end of the 19th century of course we had figured out that bloodletting was bad science. It was no longer considered a "best practice" and it was a bad idea to recommend it as a medical procedure.
