Top all-time · #21420
Caroline Rance
Personal blog · thequackdoctor.substack.comhistoryhealth
Caroline Rance writes The Quack Doctor, a personal blog at thequackdoctor.substack.com about history and health. Since 2024, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 3 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked for its history-of-medicine writing, such as the post on early human x-ray scientists. The commenter calls it interesting and uses it to discuss how slowly medical practice advanced.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Stories from the history of medicine, with an inclination towards the strange.
What Hacker News says?
This is an interesting blog. Medicine was very primitive into the early 20th century - it took centuries for the old ineffective techniques to die out. Planck's observation was paraphrased as 'science advances one funeral at a time', but Medicine resisted advancement for hundreds of years. Hustlers [0] were probably the greatest obstacle to medical progress. [0] I don't mean this as 'con artist', but people who thin…
Comment linking /p/a-caesarean-section-in-18th-century
on “The human x-ray scientists”Submitted The tooth, the whole tooth and the jawbone too as a story · 47 points
HN discussionSubmitted The human x-ray scientists as a story · 11 points
HN discussion