I don’t think this guy was intending to describe the intellectual landscape 161 years in the future (probably innocently expected progress), but he seems to have done a pretty good job:
(from the Quackwatch e-mail update)
Quackwatch has posted a digital copy of Lessons from the History of Medical Delusions, by Worthington Hooker, M.D. The book was published in 1850, when scientific medicine was in its infancy, but Hooker correctly identified what he called “the principal elements or cases of medical delusions” as dispositions toward (a) considering whatever follows a cause as being the result of that cause, (b) basing one’s beliefs on a single theory, (c) espousing the opposite of what is generally believed, (d) theorizing instead making strict observations, (e) fashion in diseases and in their remedies, (f) undue fondness toward new things, and (g) putting a low value upon the medical profession.
