Title says it all really.
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The idea behind things we now take for granted like control groups in a study did not exist. There was no statistical approach to outcomes, no doctors were doing actual studies.
Now, if we want to see if a new drug will help people, we take a very rigorous approach. We test the drug on a large group of people (generally thousands of people) not just one or two. We take detailed notes and measurements on what the drug does; if you have a drug to treat cancer, did the tumors get smaller, and if so by how much? We have comparison groups like monitoring the condition of people that didn’t get the drug to see how the disease normally progresses, so that we can compare the treatment group and see if they actually do better.
Back then, a doctor just has some idea about a disease. ‘Tumors are bad. Oak trees grow oak galls, those are kind of like tumors. Trees are healthy though, even if they get these little tumors. Maybe if I grind up the oak galls and give it to this person with cancer, they will be healthy like an oak tree. I gave it to one person, and he seemed to get better! My idea must be true. Oak galls cure cancer! I’ll tell everyone. What’s that? You tried it on someone else and they died? Well, you must have prepared the medicine wrong, or maybe they were already too sick for the treatment to be effective.’ Failures are ignored or excused for long periods until treatments basically just fall out of fashion rather than being proven to be useless.
The approach that we have in modern science is something like “if I try to disprove this idea as hard as I can and fail, then the idea is probably true”. The approach in the past was “if I have any evidence to support my idea, even just my own imagination, then the idea is probably true”.
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