After what it calls “an unduly prolonged period of reflection,” the British medical journal The Lancet has reconsidered an obituary of Dr. John Snow that it published on June 26, 1858, and apologized for other attacks on the work of the physician, who’s been dead for 155 years.
Yes, but will the Lancet retract their claim from the same period that Her Majesty’s forces killed 655,000 Russian civilians in the Crimean War?
So sometime around 2168 AD, The Lancet is going to come clean on those Iraq figures too?
“The second survey[2][3][4] published on 11 October 2006, estimated 654,965 excess deaths related to the war, or 2.5% of the population, through the end of June 2006.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_Iraq_War_casualties
The Lancet is just a lefty propaganda tool:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/warner-todd-huston/2008/02/09/us-has-killed-655-000-iraqis-soros-funded-lancet-study-debunked
Here is The Lancet publisher, Richard Horton, at an anti-war rally:
http://socialistworker.co.uk/art/9594/Video+of+Lancet+editor+Richard+Horton%26%2339%3Bs+speech+at+Time+to+Go+demonstration
Not a Lancet fan, but props to them for reminding us that doctors still did not understand the workings of cholera as late as 1858. I had thought the notion of “miasma” had been abandoned by then, but not so — it was still official thinking and was being strongly propagated, as the criticism of Dr. Snow demonstrates. Medical science lagged far behind the physical sciences.
For anyone who is interested, Steven Johnson’s “The Ghost Map” is an excellent book about John Snow’s work during the cholera outbreaks in London.