Shouldn't investing follow empirical evidence, just like medicine?
A couple of weeks ago I watched the excellent historical documentary series on PBS entitled The American Revolution. If you missed it, I believe it’s streaming on Prime now.
I find that whole era of history to be fascinating: rebellion against a tyrannical power and the formation of a new nation that one day would become the most powerful in the world. After watching the 6-episode educational series, I started re-watching a classic HBO series: John Adams, starring Paul Giamatti as the title character. The series tells the story entirely from Adams’ perspective (no Battle of Yorktown; instead we see Adams on diplomatic missions in Europe and finding out about it in the newspaper).
While in the Netherlands, hitting up Dutch bankers to fund the American war effort, Adams fell ill and there was a scene where he was getting bled by a doctor with a lancet (what they used to cut their veins).
This got me thinking about the practice of bloodletting and use of leaches in medicine—today jokingly used in reference to arcane medical practices. In today’s world of Large Language Models (AI) at my fingertips, I’m now able to ask questions on my phone while I’m watching TV—no matter how dumb—and get instant answers (this helped a lot when trying to follow along with Game of Thrones or other movies/series with a lot of background canon), so I wanted to know a bit more about bloodletting: why did they do it for so long throughout history, and did it actually work?
Discussion