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2. So now we’ve established that ’science’ is frequently used as a wishy-washy word at best. Are we talking pure research here, or application, or the way data is used to justify things that may or may not be accurate, or are we including instances where data is deliberately misconstrued to support an unfair or irrational policy, or sell something? In your case, you seem to be claiming it’s ’science’ whenever a guy with an advanced degree does something. Ok, we’ll work with that. But now you say “But science without truth is barbarism” so what is truth? Truth is beauty, beauty truth, I suppose but that’s not actually helpful. By the end of your article it is clear you mean “biblical truth” and ohhh, baby, there’s a can of worms.

3. I’m not going to declare a Godwin violation here, I’m just going to chastise you for your improper use of scare quotes. The Nazi experiments on concentration camp prisoners were vile beyond all possible imagining, but they were actually pretty scientific; as in, they resulted in usable data. And many of their scientists were top-notch, which is why we took them and their data at the end of the war. And we used them to beat the Russians to the moon.

It’s important to note the the Nazis also had a sizable pseudo-scientific crazy person science department, that, for example, funded rocket experiments designed to prove we lived in a hollow earth.

However, you can’t blame a lack of religion for Nazi atrocities, although you can certainly argue with their version of the ‘truth’ until you are blue in the face. So to wrap up everything that’s wrong with the final sentence of your opening paragraph: a) the Nazis are not the best example of science going amok because there was no religious philosophy to restrain their greed for knowledge, if anything, they managed to make a religious philosophy that was entirely consistent with their justifications for torturing concentration camp prisoners with ghastly experiments; b) if America’s Protestant religious underpinnings are a superior ethical guide to science policy than Nazi Making-Hateful-Shit-Up Christianity, then our leaders would have had a lot more qualms letting the captured scientists use and build upon the data obtained by experimenting on prisoners; c) I can’t believe you just invoked the freaking Nazis, the motherfucking Nazis, for the love of all that is holy, to set up an article about how doctors in the past were wrong to be so restrictive about parental visiting hours in pediatric wards.

Could we please show a least an inkling of a sense of perspective? Ok, then, let’s blow through the rest of this trainwreck a bit faster.

A lesser known example is the way American hospitals used to treat their pediatric patients.

Or Irish hospitals (I’ve read my Angela’s Ashes). As readers of feminist blogs know, in the past it was common for institutions such as hospitals to have paternalistic policies that seemed almost designed to upset and humiliate the ignorant masses for whom the institutions were designed. Candace misses the point entirely, even though she manages to quote the part of the article that explains this very clearly:

“Medical science was reflected through a prism of ethnicity and class,” said David Rosner, a historian of public health at Columbia. “Germs became the surrogates for older class distinctions

“The vulnerability changed from individual morality to propensity to disease,” he went on, “but the targets of the visiting restrictions — the poor, immigrants, the disenfranchised — remained the same.”

You see, Candice, science didn’t say it was only OK for parents to visit their critically sick children only two hours a week. Science said exposure to germs should be minimized in patients with compromised immune systems, and Old Educated White Men in Charge said that these children’s families - poor, uneducated, brownish-type persons - where hysterical germ sponges. Were some of these men scientists? Sure, scientists with biases you could land a plane on, cocky men in an elite rich white guy club trained by generations of aristocratic cocky rich white guys. And of course, many of them weren’t scientists. Some of them weren’t even doctors. But considering the time and place we’re talking about, I can guarantee you that all of those men considered themselves Christian.

Speaking of Angela’s Ashes, if I recall correctly the religious charity committee managed to be just as condescending and unhelpful to the poor as the charity hospital Frankie ended up at over Christmas, even without the scientific training. How about that?

Popularly held medical beliefs of yore also include:

None of these stand up to true scientific scrutiny of course. Sick people should be kept scrupulously clean, and visitors and visited alike can be protected with masks and gloves when necessary. Lobotomies are hardly surgeries to be taken lightly, and of course, doctors should always wash their hands. The lesson for doctors in all of these cases is to not be arrogant pricks, or don’t oversell your new technique, or to recognize and squash biases that may color your research or application of other’s research.

What was most shocking to discover is that only since the 1960s have things changed. Why such a backward status quo?

“One reason,” said Dr. Seidel, the veteran pediatrician, “might be because we had always done it that way. But I suspect many doctors simply found it convenient and considered parents to be in the way.”

Without truth, we all suffer. Contrast this with a King who said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”

Right, the reason hospitals of the past were terrible places filled with callous, self-satisfied administrators and doctors treating patients and families with contempt is because not enough of them were sufficiently religious. Riiiggghhhhhtttttt. It had nothing to do with medicine being a profession stuffed full of insufferably self-satisfied assholes who had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into an era where they were actually required to give a fuck about the patient or their family.

And scientists: let this reminder of assholish doctors in days past remind you to always respect your institution’s ethics committee, lest you turn into a Nazi.