The heart failure had been severe enough to cause obvious edema, yet it had improved dramatically between their two visits, almost making the patient look like a different person.
They could rule out the possibility of spontaneous recovery. Believing heart failure that severe could heal on its own was like believing in cardiac stem cells. From Barber's account, the improvement seemed to have coincided almost exactly with the course of medication prescribed by the clinic.
David, trying to keep a low profile, could feel a sharp gaze sweeping over him. It was like being back in anatomy class, except the Scalpel wasn't in the lecturer's hand. It was aimed at him, slicing open his skull to inspect what was inside.
Kraft had to admit that he held an ingrained, unspoken prejudice against the physicians of this era.
After all, their main work was to explain unsystematic clinical experience through a crude theory of the elements, and to extract the active ingredients of medicines—or what they believed to be the active ingredients—by dissolving them in water and heating them, or burning them to ash.
It was hard to say that most "treatments" did patients any good. Of the ones that probably did, most were unpredictable: they worked sometimes and failed others, and their effects were limited.
The reason internal medicine had always held a far higher status than surgery was that there were no standards for evaluating it, and patients were generally less likely to die right there in the place where they were treated. It seemed relatively less terrifying.
If David's medicine really had worked, even in just one case and without any evidence, that was interesting enough. Kraft knew of plenty of medicines that could produce better results, but none could be made by hand in a shortcut under